With the motorsport world finally putting light on the women of racing, one racer was ready to work her way up to the Formula 1 grid. As a Formula 2 rookie, she struggled, but with Red Bull Racing behind her, she was sure to cause one of hell of a c...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Before you could really understand the life of Anneli Räikkönen, you had to understand how she'd grown up. No, that didn't mean talking about the 'rich' life she lived or the fact her dad was a well-known figure. It didn't even have to do with the karting itself.
It resolved around the way Anneli dealt with it.
You see, Anneli never felt grounded as a child; she didn't see the world the same way other kids did. She barely had a school life and that stopped her from really understanding the way she was supposed to interact with other people, which is why she took after Kimi so much.
Travelling around the country and then travelling the world meant that Anneli dealt with change well but left her closed off to expressing too much emotion. She wasn't incapable of it, she just never saw the point in showing it when it only led to misinterpretations.
Anneli wasn't particularly academically smart (likely from the broken school life) but she understood the world and the world was cruel. People couldn't be trusted without reason, she thought it was stupid to do so.
Where was this all leading to?
The point was that, despite her close-off nature and lack of interest in people, Anneli managed to make friends one way or another. Admittedly, it stemmed from either arguments or sports. She had no school friends.
She met all of her friends around the age of twenty when she'd gone snowboarding for the first time alone. They had no idea what they were doing and Anneli felt sorry for them, so she helped and then she helped again. From there, they just continued to hang out.
Elijah wasn't a part of that. She'd met him years before at the age of sixteen in the Formula 1 paddock. He had no interest in being there at all. In fact, he had been forcefully dragged by the arm by his father to sit at the Lotus Renault hospitality. Being there with her dad, Anneli went to put him out of his misery by asking if she could sit there. His father knew who she was from the paddock pass and stuttered his way into saying yes.
Admittedly, Elijah hadn't been anywhere near a race since.
Elijah had been around for the longest and after spending so much time together, Anneli just assumed that they must have some kind of connection there. She'd never had any previous relationships so she assumed this was what it was supposed to be like.
