Banging Wheels

by Natalie Banks

  Where was she? Oh yes, lapping quickly. Very quickly. Then, abruptly, she was thrown out of her rhythm as she lost focus and had to practically stand on the brakes to avoid piling into the back of Daniels. She felt the harness dig into her and the front wheels lock up.

  This was an entirely different feeling. The rhythm was gone, but now she was in the moment, living on her instinct. Now she became the Hutton, and she could smell the fear of her prey. Half a lap later, she came off the brakes early, threw it down the inside of the corner, and he instinctively opened the door to let her through. So, a soft touch then, this Daniels character. She spent the next two laps driving defensively — the moment you overtook someone was when they were at their most dangerous. She’d done it herself — the instinct was to lunge back, to recover what you’d lost. It was a visceral response.

  But now having cemented the move, she focused back on chasing down the next prey — Drake. She got back into her rhythm again, feeling the circuit as a flowing whole rather than a collection of individual corners. As she reeled the laps in, so she reeled him in. Soon, his chassis was swooping about just ahead of her. She could see his style more clearly than she ever had done previously — it was smooth and calculated, a lot like him. He was fast because he made so few errors. He seemed to be able to do what she could not — stay focused. He was also calm despite the pressure she was applying, as though emotional management wasn’t a problem for him. Whereas for her, her emotions were a weapon, if at times one that was aimed at her own foot.

  Back down in the junior leagues she’d lost her temper on occasion, and made some rash moves. She’d been the victim of some ill-tempered behavior, too — one time some kid deliberately skewered her from the side at a slow corner to get her back for some perceived on-track slight — but there was something cold and calculating about Drake’s move in the previous race that infuriated her. It hadn’t seemed like a hot-headed error of judgment, but more deliberate and scheming.

  She had him now, though. Closer and closer she got until, with only five laps to go, she was right on his tail. But catching is quite easy in comparison with overtaking. Her problem now was that they were racing in near-identical cars — the only differences were in the way they’d set them up with their respective engineers. It would take a bold move to make it past.

  She tried down the inside; he calmly closed the door, and she lost ground. It took her a full lap to close back up again. She tried around the outside of another corner. This time, he just held his line and she had to back right off. This time it took her two laps to catch up. She was running out of time.

  Fortunately, she’d learned an awful lot of skills in her time in the lower divisions. Coming into a medium-speed left hander, 110 miles per hour, she flicked to the inside, drawing Drake across to defend, then immediately flicked the other way. Drake was left stranded and she was able to try going around the outside of him.

  “Got you!” she yelled in her helmet.

  But she wasn’t celebrating long. As she went into the corner, ahead of Drake but not quite past him, she felt contact at the rear of the car. You feel every tiny thing in a car like this. It’s an extension of yourself. He’d clipped her rear tire with his front wing — the piece of aerodynamics jutting out at the front of the car.

  “Idiot!” she said out loud, hoping — praying — that he hadn’t damaged her rear tire.

  She guided her car into the right-hander that followed, putting her faith in her equipment — but her rear tire had been punctured in the contact, and suddenly she found herself spinning off the track and into the gravel.

  “IDIOT!” she yelled over the radio. “I don’t believe it! Did you see what he did?”

  “Affirmative.”

  She sat in the car, her rear tires — one now heavily deflated — spinning uselessly in the gravel. The more she thought about it, the angrier she got. It had to be deliberate — there was no other way. He was too good of a driver not to appreciate the outer limits of his own car. You have an instinctive feel for such things.

  She extracted herself from the car, scrunched across the gravel and climbed over the track barrier, then started jogging back to the pits, her legs shaking so much with anger they felt like they would give way under her. How could he even conceive of doing such a thing? It was just plain cheating! That’s what it was, it was cheating!

  “Where is he?”

  Ozzie and Steve, the two engineers looked at each other, as if to say “Here’s trouble”.

  “WHERE?”

  “He’s on the podium.”

  She started to stride that way, but Ozzie, her engineer grabbed her by the arm. “This is not a good idea.”

  She wrested her arm free. “Why?”

  “Rubbing is racing.”

  “This is not stock-car racing! We need to protest!”

  “You’re kidding, aren’t you? Report one of our own drivers?”

  “But what he did was wrong!”

  “Listen. It’s not right, but that’s racing. Suck it up. Move on. If you report your own team, you can kiss your future goodbye. No one will want you.”

  She stood there, all folded arms and fixed mouth, looking at nothing in order to avoid eye contact, seething at the injustice.

  “You need to raise your game. Learn from this. If you rock the boat, only one person is going to fall out — you.”

  She marched off towards the podium, a little voice in her head — the one she always ignored — saying that this was a bad idea; that now would be a really good time to sit down and do some breathing exercises. As ever, she brushed off the internal advice and marched on.

  It was certainly something Sam Daniels had never seen before. To the gathered crowds below — not as many as for a top tier event, but still numbering in the thousands — it must have made for a particularly striking sight. One minute, Drake, the new boy, was standing atop the stage pouring the Champagne into his mouth from a height. The next he was flying sideways off the top step, the fizzy stuff following closely behind, having been firmly barged off the top step by his co-driver.

  Sam stood bemused as she verbally tore into him. He’d never seen anything like this before in his life and wasn’t sure what to make of it. Drake reminded him of a con artist he’d once met. Maybe he wasn’t a bad guy deep down, but he wasn’t Sam’s kind of person. Callie, meanwhile, was darned cute, but she seemed to be kind of hot-headed. Probably out of his league, too. Both of them were trouble. He’d been in this game too long to put his neck on the line for it. He’d realized a few years ago that he’d reached his level and it was too late to make the step up. Besides, he liked driving fast, but he didn’t much like the cut and thrust, and he wasn’t prepared to put his life on the line like the other drivers. You’ve got to know your limits. He’d do this for a few more years, focus on learning as much as he could about the sport, building friends and contacts, and then start his own team. But for now, he could do quite nicely out of this. Let them cancel each other out and maybe he’d take the title after all.

  Wait a minute, here was Callie coming over to him now. He found himself backing away instinctively. Out of nowhere, and with Drake looking on, she grabbed him by the head and the next thing he knew, she was kissing him. It was such a shock to feel her full lips pressed against his. He stood there waving his arms about in shock, her face clamped to his. They weren’t kissing — he was being kissed — and it was over before he knew it.

  “Well driven,” she said, before looking pointedly back to Drake and walking away again.

  Sam could tell he was being used as some kind of pawn, but other than that, what the hell was going on? Drake scowled at him, his eyes smoldering.

  Sam held his hands apart in expression of innocence, as if to say “What?"

  This was going to be a long season.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Drake was not a happy man. How dare Callie do that — storm the podium and steal his glory, and try to humiliate him at the same time? He’d
kept his cool, of course, deliberately transmitting a scoffing ‘really?’ attitude, like he was above it all, and like it couldn’t touch him — all stuff he’d had to learn in his youth to deal with life at boarding school; but the truth was he’d felt it well and truly. Sam fucking Daniels. I mean, really? I mean, he was an okay looking guy. Well, mediocre; harmless. What was the point of being a racing driver if you were mediocre and harmless? You might as well go home.

  He’d won, yet after that little display on the podium, he felt like he’d lost. It might not have meant anything to anyone watching from the outside — just like that was Sam Daniel’s girlfriend or something — but the image of them kissing was burned in his retinas. She’s done it to hurt him, and she’d succeeded. He knew he’d given next to nothing away. All those under-aged poker nights, betting away favors, had been excellent training for keeping his emotions from displaying. Never give your enemies anything. Not. A. Thing. At the same time, damn it, there was something so sexy and alluring about her. He didn’t like to admit it — this was the enemy after all — but he was hooked on her. He needed to beat her, and yet he also needed her, period. He couldn’t have both.

  Once again he found his thoughts segueing into being with her, lying naked in bed, her hand on his chest, his fingers tracing a sinuous line from her hip up to the swelling of her soft, supple breast. He imagined he and Callie laughing together, play-fighting and exchanging repartee. He’d been with plenty of women, but there was something so different about Callie. As much as he resented her behavior on the podium, she was one of a kind.

  Then he realized what he was thinking about and pushed it out of his mind. There was no room for sentiment, not if he wanted to win the championship this year. He had to keep her at a distance; to stop her getting in his head, to stop thinking about her, and, most importantly, to win.

  There was palpable tension in the garage at the next race. Every little detail felt like a battleground.

  “Hi,” he said as he saw someone walk in, then cursed as he realized it was her, as it gifted her the chance to blank him, which she promptly did of course.

  He didn’t have the edge out on the dusty street circuit, either. He just couldn’t seem to find any grip. He did a handful of laps, scratching about on the slippery surface, then pitted to analyze the data. That was his strength — analyze, analyze, analyze. Don’t get emotional about it — it’s just mechanical equipment obeying the laws of physics. If you want to drive more quickly, you need to break it all down to its smallest elements and focus on making each one better. But this approach seemed to work so much better on a smooth track, whereas it seemed to fall short on a street circuit like this.

  But this thing with Callie bothered him, because he found it so hard to remove emotions from the equation. He felt something, whether he liked it or not. Plus, he might have won that last race, but there had been a power shift on that podium. It was something unquantifiable, and it bothered him.

  He went out again, trying once more to apply his cool logic to the hot streets, but he just couldn’t get his head around this track. He felt the annoyance build, before losing his cool and sliding off into the wall like a rookie. Callie, meanwhile, had been imperious here in practice in a way that he couldn’t understand. As he walked back to the pits, and his broken car was craned away, he tried hard to belittle it — told himself that if anything, he was actually just too good for this circuit; that it suited hacks and hustlers, and that to be fast here was the sign of an amateur. But deep down he knew that he was just feeding himself bullshit to protect his own ego.

  Callie, meanwhile, was imperious, chucking her car around in an act of sheer delight. There was a cliche in motor racing circles that driving a car was like making love. It was certainly the case with Callie — she seemed to drive with wild, passionate abandon, like she was in the grip of something. He couldn’t help but admire her ability despite himself. Here she was now, coming back into the pits. She got out the car, pulled her helmet off — shaking out those long locks so they flowed out over her shoulders — and walked past him. Damn it — he couldn’t get near her times. He couldn’t get near her, full stop. He maintained his cool visage, but behind it he was far from sure of himself.

  Come race day, as they circulated waiting for the race to begin, he geared himself up. You’re a winner. It’s just another race, and another you can pull out of the bag.

  But it was a stretch, even for him. He’d qualified all the way down in fifth place, while she’d aced it and was right at the front of the pack. He was only able to see the back of her car during the moments when the other cars, who were weaving left and right to keep their tires warm, all coincided to be out the way at the same time, like planets aligning.

  Finally, they crossed the line, and the race was underway. He had to make early headway — he knew that much. In the mayhem heading into the first corner, he darted ahead of the Mexican Sergio Luis into the first right hander, forcing him out the way in a wheel banging maneuver. But just two corners later, he misjudged his braking and Sergio — or ‘Serge’ as he was nicknamed, partly because it sounded like ‘Surge’ — was right back past him.

  And that was it — the impetus was gone. Drake followed Serge around, choking on his dust, for lap after lap. He was marginally quicker than him, but not by enough that he could pass him. Serge wasn’t the fastest of drivers, and he wasn’t in a good car, but boy was he tough to pass. He’d learned his driving skills in the karting leagues of Europe and knew all the tricks. In fact, he seemed to know what you were going to try before you even tried it.

  Ten laps in, and Callie was well out of sight. Still, the big digital scoreboard located on the straightaway said the same thing each time he came past — Callie in first place. Serge, meanwhile, continued to frustrate him. He knew the guy from a lower formula. Indeed, they were pretty close for a time — one of the few people in his life he genuinely trusted. It was Serge who had introduced him to Mezcal on a night out in Texas, and they’d both taken shit from their respective team bosses the next day. They’d turned up to qualify still half drunk and stinking of spirits — and each with a girl on their arm — and were barred from taking part. The result was that they started at the back of the grid on race day, where they promptly took each other out at the first corner. It was hilarious looking back, but those days were gone. Things were much more professional now, which was why they’d drifted apart. Racing and personal relationships were incompatible.

  Drake tried for the inside once again, then the outside, sliding this way and that, but Serge always had the answer.

  “Arriba! Abajo! Al centro! Pa’ dentro!” Serge liked to say, generally a sign that the night was likely to slide into a hazy mess of agave-based alcohol and loose women.

  Drake’s hands were stiffening on the wheel, and he could feel blisters forming as he wrenched it this way and that. Damn street circuit. Why do they even have these things? He found himself slamming on hard once again as Serge closed the door on another move. He had to calm down — frustration was the enemy. A cool head was what was required. But there was nothing he could do. Street circuits were hard enough to make a pass on, but against a customer like Serge it was practically impossible. As the raced closed out, he knew the game was up. He kept probing, kept right on his tail, just in case Serge made a mistake, but none came. He trundled dejectedly across the line in fifth place.

  Up on the podium, Callie was busy spraying fizzy stuff around. The security had picked up after the incident at the last race, but he had to get up there. He had to do something to disrupt her rhythm.

  “Wanna swap?” he said to a nearby track marshal, offering him his helmet and pointing to his access all areas pass.

  “Too right!”

  Up on the podium, Sam Daniels was enjoying yet another high scoring finish. Second place was nothing to be sniffed at, especially on a circuit like this. That young gun Callie had finished way ahead of him. She was a good driver, although she seemed a bit er
ratic and kind of scared him a little. She’d barely registered him since that incident on the last podium, telling him that, as he’d suspected, her kiss hadn’t been sincere. They sprayed champagne in each other’s faces, and then Sam tipped it up and poured it over the head of Callie’s Australian mechanic, who was also up there. Another chance to build bridges — one day he might even employ the guy, you never knew.

  Then from nowhere, a dark looming shape. It was that teammate of hers — Drake. He looked to Callie, whose facial expression had changed to one of apprehension. But it was Sam he was walking towards, with a weird smile on his face.

  Oh Jesus, what now?

  At first he thought he was going to hit him but, as Sam tried to back away, Drake grabbed him heartily by his upper frame.

  “DON’T KISS ME!”

  “I just want to congratulate you. You were the best driver out there today.”

  “And how would you know?” said Callie, behind him. “You were miles behind. Literally.”

  But Drake ignored her, and shook him in an overly-friendly way that, to Sam at least, seemed forced and insincere.

  “Look, I don’t know what’s going on,” said Sam, ducking out, “but you two need to sort this out. It’s nothing to do with me.”

  He walked away, clutching a near-empty bottle of champagne, leaving the two exchanging distrustful glances behind.

  Drake sat prodding at the airline meal chicken, occasionally trying to steal a glance at Callie, who was on the other side of the plane and several rows in front. He wanted her, but he wanted to win, too. He couldn’t have both. Maybe he couldn’t have either. He slid into a daydream and briefly found himself imagining a world where he didn’t care about motor racing, where winning wasn’t important to him. Could it work then? He struggled to hold the idea in his mind. Auto racing was his passion in life. If he gave that up, he’d be giving some part of himself up. And why should it be him, and not her? But then he tried to picture a Callie that wasn’t similarly driven and competitive, a Callie with some office job or other. That passion and drive, that sparkle in her eye, that not taking of bullshit — they were the things that made her who she was. Without them, she wouldn’t be Callie.