Faith thanks the valet who holds the door for her and gets into the car that will take her to the race track. The sky is blue; the Australian summer is not going to interfere with the proceedings. This is the first day of training. The build-up for her first Formula 1 weekend is about to start. She has feared this day, but she is also ready for it.
It has not been easy. This is a man’s world, and support for her had been very limited, to say the least. Most of the people she has had to deal with had been in the business before she was born, and they refused to accept her, starting with the lawyers and accountants she had dealt with in Scotland, the sponsors, the engineers, the managers, the people from FIA, the partners, the journalists. Not even her own people had been willing to accept her. They knew her by sight, as her grandfather’s shadow, present at the paddock and at social functions, but they had known her as an ornament. They had never spoken to her, and they had found the shift sudden and largely unacceptable.
The first question, whether said out loud or implied, had always been when and to whom she intended to sell. The next had been whom she would install as executive manager. She had learned that she had better not smile when telling them that she was going to install herself. Raised eyebrows and condescending smiles had been the standard reaction.
Often she had been on the verge of asking George Strathairn for Tom’s phone number, or contacting his former management. She had never done it. She had decided to hire an assistant instead. She has a bachelor’s degree in economics, which means that she is able to read a business plan and understand figures and numbers; the master’s paper had been cut short by her grandfather’s decline in health, but she is not totally unprepared. What she needs is a friend, but you cannot hire those, and so she had spent three days in a headhunter’s office in Wallbrook in the City of London, trying to find a match for her very specific needs.
The result is sitting next to her: Nicholas, a twenty-seven year old lawyer, fresh out of Cambridge, public school accent and well connected, prepared to travel a lot, gay, she thinks, and curious about the experience. Also, he is expensive, but when he calls her ‘ma’am’, it sounds convincing. They had agreed on a trial period, after which they would either part ways, or he would be allowed to hire the administrative staff he needs. She thinks that he is a good investment – an assistant in a designer suit who speaks the language of the trade and is, most importantly, a man. He is there to stop the jokes about pink race cars. She had sufficiently upscaled her self staging.
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He reads out an email. The team executives and race track organisers are to attend a meeting after the training session to discuss critical safety regulations and general information by the track management. She sighs and thanks him. Then she opens her pocket mirror and checks her make-up. I’m so glad that you can’t see me, mum, she thinks.
It is good that the first race in the calendar happens so far away from Europe. In Britain, everybody, somewhat perversely, seems to be looking forward to be witnessing the annihilation of Claymore under her management, especially since she had exchanged a driver at the last minute and the disappearance of one of their bigger sponsors. Her team had kept quiet, but she does not believe for one second that they trust her. They just know better than to stir things up even further. It is fatalism, not trust, that keeps the men silent.
She has begun to understand what her grandfather had tried to teach her about racing, although his method had been weird and she had not liked it at all. When she had acquired her driver’s licence and set out to study at Glasgow University, he had bought her a car. She had hoped it would be a nice one – not a Jag, no, but a swift and flashy Mini Cooper perhaps, that would have been cool. He had handed her the keys to a broke-ass Civic, almost as old as herself, dark grey and pre-loved in an unappealing way. He had laughed at her disappointment and told her that if she wanted to understand driving and cars, she needed to learn by driving the weakest possible vehicle there was. This was going to teach her efficiency, it would sharpen her perception and enable her to gauge situations precisely. And he had not been wrong. Whenever she was driving a fast car now, she felt herself adjust to whatever that car had to offer, and to appreciate more horsepower, good traction, technical assists – and she was able to put them to good use. She was never going to think like a racing driver, but she had learned to understand the language of driving.
The same philosophy Burns had been applying to his team. Claymore might have been one of the weakest teams in the circus for a reason. People who had started their career through Claymore knew their stuff; Tom Healey was only one example of many. Burns had not been ambitious; he had enjoyed racing, and he had loved the works. He had been well respected, a fixture, a legend in his own way. With him gone, however, things had changed. Her taking over had somehow laid bare the fact that Claymore was not really competitive, and she would have to work hard to earn some respect. She would have to be ambitious.
The car goes through the gate and stops in the parking lot behind the paddock. Faith dons her sunglasses and walks towards the entrance. Only Nicholas might have noticed that her hand is shaking when she holds it out for the machine to read the chip on her wristband. Hopefully, it will go well – although at this moment she would not have been able to say what ‘well’ actually means.
