Chapter 328: El Plan
"So now what?" was the question going through the minds of nearly everyone who followed Fatih’s career, from any level they had discovered him.
The reason Fatih had high expectations and was crushed when his exemption application to the FIA was denied was not just because he was arrogant about his talent and expected everyone and everything to bend over backward to accommodate him, but because of the sheer number of different groups participating in the lobbying campaign for the FIA to allow the exemption for Fatih.
In the lead were both Red Bull and TOSFED, who had the largest influence. Red Bull wanted their driver to be able to debut as early as possible to gain experience, while TOSFED wanted to finally have the first Turkish driver in F1. They had been supporters of Fatih, providing both monetary support and a frictionless process for all the paperwork that needed to be provided, approved, and more for him, so they both pushed for it fully.
His mother herself wasn’t sitting back letting others do the hard work, as she had also applied pressure through both Elena Petrova, who was already building her connections to the F1 and FIA scene, and through their holding company that held nearly five percent of Liberty Media shares.
Lastly, but not least, were the fans, with a large chunk of them being of Turkish ethnicity, Muslims, or just people who loved Fatih, who also made their voices known that they wanted it to happen.
With all of that on the table, the exemption application was all but accepted; at least, that was on the minds of those who knew the full scope of the operation. Fatih, although he thought about things rationally, didn’t see any big chance of it not being accepted and had practically considered it a done deal.
But he had failed to account for the FIA going that far in order to avoid the governing body looking weak and indecisive. They had determined that granting a waiver to a 16-year-old, who would break the record in his first few rounds of racing before turning 17 during the 2020 season, would make them look weak. They would be breaking the rule that they had invented to stop exactly that from happening, and to do it for a driver who would have been younger than the one who caused the rule to be invented in the first place was not something they were willing to allow.
The protests from other teams like Mercedes and Ferrari, who had the biggest influence, didn’t help either, as they had threatened that they were also going to be applying for exemptions for their drivers if that precedent was set by granting Fatih the waiver, giving the FIA’s argument more strength against the enormous forces lobbying for them to change it.
......
Helmut Marko was the most conflicted individual in this entire matter. Although he was not in the least satisfied that they had lost the chance of breaking the record for the youngest driver to ever drive an F1 car and replace Albon, who was going to be promoted to the main Red Bull team in 2020, he was also relieved that it was not accepted, as this meant they had kept their side of the deal with the Verstappens, whom they had promised to not fully back Fatih’s early entry into the F1 paddock.
But if he had a choice, he would have gone with the one where Fatih’s exemption was granted, as the Verstappens couldn’t really leave at the moment. There was no other team that could accommodate them as Red Bull was doing, as they were finally set to have Max as the definitive number one driver of Red Bull.
With the transition to Honda engines having worked wonderfully for them this year, allowing them to plan for a possible title fight against the dominant Mercedes within the next two seasons if everything went well, there was no way they would leave. Although the relationship would be slightly strained, that was not something he would have worried about at all.
However, now with the decision made and any chance of it being appealed out of the window, they had to do something about Fatih’s 2020 and decide what he was going to do. In preparation for the application being denied, he had already prepared a plan.
He reached into the drawer on his table and pulled out a stack of documents with the front paper having only a single line written in bold letters: Fatih Yıldırım Project 2020.
He was not planning on sending him to F2 at all, as that risked having people scrutinizing his every drive and constantly comparing it to see if it was worthy of an F1 debut. Although he was sure Fatih would remove all doubt, that would be diluting the hype he had been building for the sake of instant gratification when he could delay it for an entire year and fully prepare him behind the scenes.
When he returned to the stage, he would be in for full delayed gratification, and that would have the highest return of any move they could make at the moment.
The plan was exhaustive, to make sure that by the end of it, Fatih had enough experience to dwarf any rookie other than those who debuted before the limited testing time rule was put in place.
It was divided into two parts: on-track and simulator experience. Using the rule that allowed for unlimited testing time for cars that were two years old or more, he planned to have Fatih driving the 2018 Red Bull RB14 on different tracks to ensure he had enough experience handling an F1 car on tracks with different elevations, corner profiles, and downforce requirements. This would be done by renting the tracks for private testing weeks where he would be practicing everything from full race simulations, fuel saving, tire management, ERS deployment strategies, and more.
All of this would also be run in tandem with virtual race simulations, as he would be benchmarked on these tracks against Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo, who had driven these cars on these tracks, for rapid improvement and to see how much he could improve and get closer to their lap times and keep them there consistently.
This would be mixed with pressure drills where engineers would deliberately give him incorrect information over the radio or simulate system failures to test his mental resilience and problem-solving skills under pressure.
When all of that was over, he would then be embedded for the remainder of the season with the AlphaTauri engineering team to allow him to build relationships with mechanics, learning the team’s procedures and communication style, along with his racing engineer, James, who would be going through all of this with him long before his official debut.
He closed the document with satisfaction, confident that his plan was enough to soothe Fatih and more.
But they plan, and God plans, and God is the best of planners. Every bit of the plan Helmut had come up with was going to be derailed by something no one had expected, barring one person.
At that moment, that person was looking at satellite images of hospitals in Wuhan, bought and analyzed by the analytics company he created last year, and the number of cars in the parking lots of these hospitals was already sixty percent more than the average for the same time over the past six years.
