Read Chapter 6: Race Day Gamble

The roar of twenty engines bounced off the harbor walls as Elise stood at the pit wall, headset pressed tight against her ears. Monaco on race day was a different beast—the air thick with fuel and anticipation, the grandstands a riot of color above them. Below, the grid shimmered in formation for the formation lap.

Julien sat P10, trapped behind slower cars on a circuit where overtaking was a rumor. Elise had run the simulations all night. The undercut was her only weapon.

"Box, box. Julien, we're calling you in lap twelve for the undercut. Mediums. We have a four-second window to clear Perez."

Silence. Then Julien's voice crackled through, flat and dismissive. "Negative. Tires are fine. I'll manage the overcut."

Elise glanced at Marco, who stood beside her with crossed arms, a smirk tugging at his mouth. He said nothing. He didn't have to.

"Julien, listen to me. Perez is struggling with graining on his front left. If we pit now, we clear him and jump Magnussen. The data says—"

"I said negative." His tone sharpened. "I want a two-stop strategy. Box me on lap twenty."

Elise felt the heat rise in her chest. She could see the timing screens. Perez was already in the pits. She had a three-lap window, and Julien was burning through it.

"You don't have the pace to hold him off on worn rubber. He's a second a lap faster than you right now."

"Then I'll drive faster."

Marco made a soft noise, almost a laugh. Elise removed her headset long enough to wipe the sweat from her brow, then pressed it back on.

On the monitors, Perez emerged from the pits on fresh mediums. His next lap was a 1:14.8. Julien's current lap: 1:16.4. A second and a half gap and climbing.

"Julien, I'm calling the strategy. Box now."

"Are you the driver or am I?" The venom in his voice was unmistakable. "I've won this race three times. You've never even been here."

"Julien, please—"

The radio clicked off.

Elise watched the screens with a growing sense of dread. Lap thirteen. Lap fourteen. Julien's times dropped steadily. By lap fifteen, Perez had caught him. By lap sixteen, Perez was alongside at the exit of the tunnel, and Julien had nowhere to go but the wall. He lifted, losing two positions in one corner.

By lap twenty, when he finally pitted, he'd fallen to P14. The undercut window was long gone.

---

The checkered flag fell three hours later. Julien finished P9. Two points. A disaster for a team fighting for the championship.

Elise waited in the garage as he climbed out of the car, helmet under his arm, face flushed with exertion and anger. The media descended immediately, cameras flashing. His engineer—her—didn't escape their lenses either.

"Julien! What happened out there? Why did you lose positions in the early laps?"

Julien didn't hesitate. He looked directly at Elise, then turned to the camera cluster.

"My race engineer made a call to pit early that I disagreed with. I overrode it because I know this track better than anyone. Unfortunately, the confusion cost us track position." He gave a thin, practiced smile. "We'll debrief internally and fix the communication issues before the next race."

Elise's jaw tightened. She said nothing. Not here, not in front of cameras that would clip ten seconds of footage and spin it around the world.

But when Julien walked past her into the garage, she followed.

---

The debrief room was glass-walled, a fishbowl visible to the entire team. Julien was already there, arms folded, leaning against the table. Marco stood near the door. The team principal, Aleksandr Voss, sat at the head, his silver hair immaculate, his expression unreadable.

Voss gestured to the empty chair. "Sit, Elise."

She sat.

Voss pressed a button on a tablet. The wall screen lit up with lap-by-lap telemetry.

"Julien, walk me through your decision."

Julien gestured vaguely. "I felt the tires had more life. The undercut wasn't guaranteed. I made a driver's call—"

"The undercut was guaranteed," Elise said quietly.

Everyone turned to her.

She reached into her bag and pulled out a tablet—her personal one, with her own encrypted files. She had promised herself she would never let this data out of her sight. Now she pushed it across the table.

"I ran two hundred simulations overnight. With a pit on lap twelve, your projected finish was P4. We had a clear track, a four-second gap to Perez, and a tire delta of one-point-four seconds per lap over the next eight laps. The undercut wasn't risky—it was mathematical certainty."

She tapped her screen. The telemetry from the gap she'd identified during practice appeared. The invisible data. The broken thread.

"I also have raw telemetry from FP1 and FP2 showing the same sensor anomalies I flagged. The same ones Marco called 'noise.'" She looked at Marco, who had gone still. "I've been documenting everything since the wrench incident. Every tool I touched. Every file I accessed. Every sensor reading that didn't match the baseline. This isn't just about one race. Someone on this team doesn't want me to succeed, and they're willing to sabotage the car to make it happen."

The silence was total.

Julien's face had gone through several shades of red. "You're accusing—"

"I'm not accusing anyone. I'm showing my work." Elise met his eyes. "You overrode a strategy that would have put you in points contention. You lost ten seconds because you didn't trust me. And then you blamed me on live television."

"I didn't blame you, I said there was confusion—"

"You said 'my race engineer made a call I disagreed with.' What do you think that means?"

Julien's fists clenched. "You have no idea what it's like out there. You've never driven—"

"No. I never have." Elise stood. "But I've been racing on a computer since I was nine. I've built suspension models that got you two podium finishes last year—you just didn't know it was me. I know this car better than you do. And I know that if you had followed my instructions today, you'd be celebrating. Instead, you're defending ninth place like it's a victory."

Voss raised a hand. "Enough."

The room stilled.

Voss looked between them, his gaze cold and final. "Here is what I understand. We have a championship-caliber car and a driver who is one of the best alive. We have an engineer whose record, I admit, I didn't fully review before hiring." He paused. "And we have internal conflict that is costing us points."

He slid a tablet toward each of them.

"Julien. Elise. You will work together. Not 'don't kill each other.' Not 'pretend to get along.' Together. I don't care how you feel about each other. If I see one more race where the driver overrides the pit wall or the engineer changes strategy without driver consent, you both walk. We have drivers queuing for this seat, and we have engineers with twice Elise's experience whose phones I could ring tonight."

Julien started to speak, but Voss silenced him with a look.

"The next race is in two weeks. I expect you to spend that time in the simulator together. Together. If you can't solve this, I'll solve both your contracts." He stood. "This meeting is over."

---

Elise didn't follow Julien out. She gathered her tablets, her notes, the stack of printed telemetry that now felt like a life raft in a storm.

She was halfway to the door when a voice stopped her.

Julien stood in the doorway, blocking her path. His face had lost its earlier fury. What remained was something harder to read—weariness, maybe. Or calculation.

"You said you built suspension models that got me podiums last year."

"I did."

"Under whose name?"

"Nadia's team. The aero department. I was a contractor."

He studied her a long moment. "What was your name before Elise Moreau? Because I don't remember anyone by that name in aero."

Elise's heart stuttered. She had been careful. So careful.

"I used my mother's name. Michaud."

Julien's eyes narrowed. He was thinking, turning something over.

"Michaud," he repeated slowly. "There was a Michaud who flagged a brake failure on my car at Spa in 2021. Saved my life. My chief engineer at the time said it was a fluke. A lucky catch by a junior analyst who didn't understand what she was seeing."

Elise said nothing.

"Her name," Julien said, "was Madeleine Michaud. She was let go two months later."

The name hung between them. One letter away from the secret she had buried for years.

"Madeleine was my sister," Elise said quietly. "She didn't make it to Monaco that year. Her plane crashed on the way home from a supplier meeting."

Julien's face lost its color.

"You're the one who saved my career," he whispered. "And I've spent the last week treating you like—"

"Like a mistake," Elise finished. "I know."

She stepped past him into the Monaco evening. The engines had gone quiet, but her heart hadn't. Somewhere behind her, she heard Julien start to speak again—but she didn't turn back.