The Bull Prince | Max Verstappen

Chapter Two: Max Verstappen

20th March 2016

Loud music was blasting from the speakers, everywhere sweaty and dancing people, who couldn't keep their hands away from each other, while others were drinking the night away at the bar. The first race of the year always called for a little celebration, normally. Joanna struggled to describe the race in one word. It was disastrous. A lot of people retired before the race even had really started and Joanna had felt something strange in the pit of her stomach.

The only thing which seemed to spook around in Joanna's head was Fernando's accident. Watching the replay, it had looked brutal. Flying through the air like he did before he collided with the ground again. It reminded her that racing was dangerous and that her rival wasn't immortal, neither was she, or the people she cared most for.

They've told her to stay safe and beware of wreckage. At first, all she did was ask what happened, but the team had a strict no-telling-the-driver-who-got-seriously-hurt policy. So, Joanna had to drive past, in order to see what happened.

Matteo was fast to tell her, that nobody was critically injured. Quickly, however, her guilt crept in when she watched the replay from the start. Fernando's car was completely wreaked.

It was fairly easy, the job as a race driver. You drive one of the god damned coolest cars ever-existing far too fast on awesome racetracks around the whole world against other adrenaline junkies, who would rather die than let you overtake them. For sure these people are not normal, but which people are, right?

It's great fun, really but there is so much more to it than what the fans see. There is heartbreak, fear, happiness and so much more. A never-ending roller coaster of feelings until the race is over and you go home.

Or you never go home because you died.

Her mind kept telling her that she should stop racing. That it was too dangerous, maybe she should go and find herself a husband and have a punch of disgustingly sweet babies, but Joanna loved racing. It was the only thing she could do really very well. Most of the time, she felt immortal.

Honestly, it was all just a game for them, most of the time. Knocking on death's door, that was the easy part of the game, the difficult part was the waiting. The longer you waited before you ran away, the cooler you were.

They were all cheating death, feeling unstoppable but sometimes death got one of them or had already reached out for them before they could manage to scarcely escape like Fernando today, and then they felt it. They felt that they weren't immortal and that they couldn't promise the people they loved most on this planet that they would come back home to them after they went to work in the morning.

Joanna knew that realistically nobody could promise that they wouldn't die, but race driver they tried to trick death, angered him their whole life until he finally got a hold of them. She hated to remember that they couldn't escape him. In the end, death would win, even though nobody got hurt badly this time. What about next time?

Maybe nine years of risking her life were enough. Maybe she should walk away and have the family she never dared to hope for while risking everything. She was only 25, life was still long, would she stop now, but that was the problem with being born with petrol in her veins. She was addicted to it. Even if she wanted to turn her back on the sport and walk away, never to be seen again, she wouldn't manage that. She could never leave.

It was Sebastian, who had pulled her away from her thoughts. The German had organized some weirdly colored cocktails some time ago, but the youngest Lauda wouldn't complain. The younger Ferrari driver watched the people around them from her place next to Sebastian at the bar.