Chapter Text
The last race before Summer Break is Spa.
Logan is currently one point from the lead in the driver’s championship. 228 to Oscar's 229.
The window is open slightly and the chill from the downpour happening outside is slowly overpowering the heater in the room. Logan doesn’t even think he can get up to close it.
What makes him think he can win the championship?
It’s against Oscar.
Oscar who had won the world championship last year. Won in f2 and in f3 as well.
Oscar who had proven himself over and over again.
Oscar who doesn’t seem fazed about fighting for the championship. As if he knows he will be the one to win again.
Oscar who has been staring at him from across the paddock at all hours of the day.
Logan thinks that it’s maybe a psychological attack.
A large gust of wind breaks past the curtains and the goosebumps start to rise under his sweater. He suppresses a shiver and somehow that feels like a little victory.
He had asked Zhou, Alex, Lance and now Liam, the two had started talking to him post Canada, on occasion if they had noticed the same but they all gave some variation of “It’s probably fine, why don’t you go to talk to him?”, followed by a swift change in topic. Logan wasn’t going to be the one to switch it back.
Oscar had known the others longer anyway.
Just like he has been leading the championship.
Its only one point.
Logan has no other choice on what to do.
He gets up and closes the window.
——
The rain hasn’t let up around the circuit since Logan has landed and he hates it. The track looks too slippery, and Logan always hated how he performed in the wet
If crashes counted as performing.
Logan sits in the media room which seems eerily still this early in the morning. He can hear the rain physically pounding on the roof, the heater unit working overtime to barely affect the room temperature. Logan thinks he’s lost feeling in his fingers. He thinks he should tell someone, maybe Jenson, so that he doesn’t have to sit here by himself waiting for someone to ask him a question. Having control of one’s fingers is definitely important when driving the car.
“Logan! Last race before summer break starts! Do you feel confident that you can regain the championship lead before the weekend is over?” Someone asks from the back.
“I’d like to,” He starts, and that earns Logan a round of chuckles he isn’t sure he understands. “But obviously I can’t be 100% certain. I will be trying my best this weekend and I know Oscar will be doing the same.” It’s a generic answer he knows it, everyone knows it, but it’s not like he could say anything else. The reporter at least looks satisfied.
Logan rubs his palms together in an attempt to warm his hands back up. The whirring of the heater has stopped, the cold still persists.
“Last question, I think we are pretty short for time.” The moderator says before turning to the floor.
“For Logan,” The reporter starts, and for a second the room is eerily silent as if the rain decided to pause for this moment only. “How does it feel to be competing against your childhood friend Oscar, finally on the same level?”
Logan freezes.
It shouldn’t surprise him that they are asking this question. They both were 2023 rookies, it’s only fair that they would be asking him about this now. It doesn’t make sense however why they would highlight the fact that he’s always been below Oscar.
Logan can feel all the eyes in the room turn onto him.
“Uh, I-“
The FIA must take mercy on him as he gets cut off the very next second. “Unfortunately, we do have another block of drivers coming in soon and we are pressed for time. So we are going to have to end it here. Sorry about that everyone!”
Logan sighs in relief.
He’s the first one out of the door when they finally let the drivers leave. Logan trudges out into the rain, forgoing the umbrella his media intern had waiting for him. The rain immediately soaks through his shirt, and Logan is pretty sure his shoes are flooded already by the amount of puddles he has stepped right into. Logan makes it back into the hospitality muttering a few apologies for tracking the water in before beelining to his drivers room for a fresh set of clothes. And maybe a new pair of sneakers.
“Mate that was such a weird question to leave off on!” Zhou says barging in from the door Logan had thought he’d locked.
Logan shrieks. Zhou laughs.
“What are you doing in here.” Logan yells at Zhou, who flops on Logan’s couch to continue laughing.
“I was trying to figure out what happened at the press conference. Are you alright, mate?
Zhou’s phone buzzes three times from where he’s placed it on Logan’s table. He ignores it so Logan follows suit.
“Yeah? I mean it was weird but there’s not much I can do about it. After all it’s the truth isn’t it.” And what can Logan say to that.
Something flickers in Zhou’s eyes and he scrunches his face up.
“You can’t possibly think tha-“
His phone starts ringing, and Zhou picks it up frowning at the caller id. He declines and turns back to Logan.
“As I was saying, that reporter was seriously screwed up. There’s no way he could-“
Zhou’s phone starts ringing once more, and as much as Logan would like to hear words of reassurance he wants to be alone right now even more.
“You should probably get that mate.” Logan says. “It might be important y’know.”
Zhou sighs and stands with an apology. “I’ll see you at the team meeting later, yeah?”
“Sure.” Logan responds.
The door shuts and Logan flops backwards onto the couch. Obviously he wasn’t the only one to notice how much closer he is to Oscar in terms of skill now. He just wasn’t expecting them to be so harsh about it, to ask about it.
Logan’s skin feels too tight and he feels like his stomach is folding in on itself over and over. There’s enough time before the first meeting today for Logan to take a nap. His head is buzzing too much anyways. Logan dreams of crashing, of losing the championship to Oscar. Of losing racing again. He thinks he deserves it. When Logan wakes up his mind is more chaotic than before.
Chaos theory is a branch of mathematics that focuses on analyzing patterns in apparently random or unpredictable behavior in systems which are governed by deterministic laws.
A study to prove that time evolution can in fact solve nonlinear and complex linear systems.
Rooted in many different cultures, karmic beliefs, and even science, Chaos theory is our attempt to understand the natural world.
The most well known example is through the Butterfly effect in which small changes can lead to unpredictable outcomes. A butterfly flaps its wings in Hong Kong and there’s an earthquake in San Francisco.
Sometimes the residual waves an earthquake can start these small changes.
Across the world there are thousands of dormant fault lines. These lines which were mostly caused by fissures starting from underneath the earths crust and breaking free are not hit with large enough activity under the crust to be the start of such major earthquakes.
These fault lines do not always remain dormant.
Suppose an earthquake happens far away and somehow the residual waves make it to one of these dormant fault lines. These waves are not strong enough to break the layers of rock within the ground but it’s enough to tilt them. This creates a non-planar fault. Over time pressure from both sides of this new fault line will cause the fault to slip into itself, twisting the layers of rock into itself, creating a fold. Each successive rock layer will follow the curve of the fold, youngest on top and oldest on the bottom. This fault line if left alone will eventually, over hundreds of thousands of years, collapse fully into the crust.
This is line is called a complex fault zone.
Over the next couple million years new rock layers will start to form on top of this area, and, unless a massive geological event occurs, it will look like nothing happened at all.
Logan walks into the paddock the next day completely fine, with 10 hours of sleep.
The rain had cleared up sometime in the morning and Logan feels refreshed not to have any major media commitments until Saturday.
Fp1 starts and ends decently. Considering the track is drying Logan thinks that p4 in practice is not that bad. In fact it’s making him look forward to the rest of the weekend more than ever. If seeing Oscar in p7 makes him even the least bit happy he regrets it immediately afterwards.
The guilt must hit him a little too hard because by the end of fp2 Logan finds himself p5 to Oscars p2. It’s not too bad he thinks as he gets out of the car for the day, he’s doing way better than he’s expected already.
Logan reviews the data that same night and goes to bed early, claiming that he did not get enough sleep the night before. He sleeps for longer this night. Logan still wakes up exhausted.
The exhaustion must have hit him hard because he lands p4 in fp3 and by the time qualifying starts and finishes Logan is p3.
Oscar is p4, Logan tries not think about what that means for the championship.
For the reporter.
For him.
——
Race Sunday starts slowly. Despite the relatively dry weather that had permeated most of the weekend there had been rain the night before.
Logan wakes after all 3 of his alarms to his trainer knocking on the door to ask if he’s almost ready. He calls out a “yes” just loud enough to be heard through the door and falls back into the bed.
He wants to go back to bed.
Logan spends most of the time on the drivers parade debating with himself how wet the track will be in an hour when they finally start to race. He spends the rest of the time happily chatting with Lance about summer break plans and how he plans to relax after the first half of the season. He pretends not to notice a certain papaya driver staring at him from across the truck.
Standing through the national anthem proves to be a struggle, Logan is practically itching to get behind the wheel. Just 44 laps until Logan finds out the fate of his summer break.
The formation lap comes and goes and by the time it registers to Logan that he’s claiming into Eau Rouge Logan has already overtaken Zhou into p2.
Lap 1, ends with Logan p2. His engineer tells him to take it easy.
Lap 6, Oscar has overtaken Zhou as well. Logan’s grip on his wheel tightens. There’s a 1.5 second gap between them.
Lap 15, Logan’s race engineer tells him that Oscar is attempting an undercut after bringing the gap down to 0.9 seconds.
Lap 16, Logan pits. He comes out just ahead. Barely missing Oscar’s front wing as Logan maneuvers his car ahead.
By Lap 27, the two have been swapping positions at practically every corner. Logan currently leads as Charles Leclerc had a long pit stop putting him in p4 when he exited.
Lap 28, Logan is just about to overtake Oscar going into the hairpin at turn 8.
There is a gap, and this time Logan will take it.
Logan has to take it.
He dives in from the inside and makes it just past Oscars front wing for the lead when he feels something hook onto his right rear tire.
Within a blink of an eye Logan is pressed right up against the side of his car spinning into the gravel. It’s startling how fast it all happens, the air ripped out from his lungs, the split second to brace himself for impact. For anyone else there would be the split second of confusion.
But Logan has been here before.
By the time Logan regains his breath the dust around his car has settled and it finally registers that his radio has been going off
“Logan, Logan come in, are you alright?”
“Yeah, yeah nothings broken. Sorry about that guys.”
“Don’t worry about it right now,” Is the response from Jenson who has come onto the radio. “Just get out of the car and hang tight, you guys crashed in a pretty far spot. The car will come pick you guys up soon.”
Logan pulls out the wheel sighing as he musters enough strength to hoist himself out of his car stumbling a little at the dismount, he sighs as he watches the train of cars slow down on the track in front of him. The yellow flags past the barrier mock him. Logan finally looks around at the pieces of faring scattered amongst the gravel. His eyes widen as the colors start to shift from navy blue to a bright neon orange car sitting scratched up just ten paces away.
His heart drops for a second when he doesn’t see the familiar yellow and orange of Oscars helmet. Sure he had wanted to beat Oscar, especially this race, but Logan would never want for him to get injured.
Closer towards the barriers he can make out the man in the papaya race suit making their way over towards him and Logan has no other option but to reciprocate.
They meet by the side of the track and he can see Oscar visibly worried as he scans Logan for any injuries. Logan finds himself doing the same back.
This isn’t the first time they’ve crashed together, and certainly not the first time in a championship battle either, but this time still feels different somehow. Logan knows the cameras are watching them right now so he tires to navigate them further off the track. Oscar stands looking at Logan. From behind Oscar, he can see the race restart and the cars start peeling away from the two of them once more.
They both had taken their helmets off, and for the first time in what has probably been forever Logan’s eyes find Oscar’s.
Most complex fault zones remain dormant until the earths internal cycle eventually dissolves its existence through new plate tectonics.
Sometimes however that isn’t the case. More often than not these sites are discovered and put on show for everyone to see.
You stopped being someone who disappears into the background a long time ago.
The axial plane is a plane that intersects the curves formed on top of the complex fault zone. Stress from either side of the bend presses both sides of the rock formation together, the line where they meet is called the hinge line. This is important because eventually no new layers can make it over the fold completely. The fold itself eventually pushes up into existence as a mountain, while the rock layers that couldn’t fully form over are left in sharp protruding points facing the fold. This makes for an interesting landscape. One where there is a large plain or singular large mountain surrounded by half broken down mountains due to pressure only being spread from one side of the structure.
This is called an anticline.
In most cases, a fully formed anticline is extremely hard to access. The protruding formations form a sort of ring around the inner structure, these rings can be extremely deep and hard to accurately navigate through and impossible to navigate around.
It’s even harder to get out of an anticline if you find yourself in one. It’s a beautiful geological event, one that can only be noticed years after it has already happened. There is no way out, but climbing atop the central mountain will show you the freedom you will never achieve.
The thing about geological formations, is that the slightest weakness can change an entire formation.
An anticline is nothing but a structure built to protect.
Protect you.
The thing about geological formations, is that they will always form late.
By the time you notice it might just be too late.
You are staring into the eyes of the person who you loved. Who you’ve lost. Who you still love, and neither of you know what to say anymore.
You don’t even think you know who he is.
All Logan knows is that he wants Oscar back.
——
Summer break starts weirdly and ends worse.
Logan has been switching through lying on his bed and lying on the sofa. Neither of those spots feel comfortable anymore, the 90 degree heat sticking to his skin, so he reluctantly drags himself up to the kitchen for a non-trainer approved meal. He’d been having a lot more of those after Spa happened and to counteract the excess carbs he had also been doubling up on his workout routine. He knows that right after that he’d curl back up in bed and go to sleep early again.
All things considered it doesn’t sound like a bad plan for Logan.
He had been trying to off Instagram on his phone after the race, everyone important had his number anyways. He had been telling himself that it was certain the media was already circulating how he was back to his old ways: That Logan probably knew that he couldn’t beat Oscar fairly so he had crashed them both out.
Grabbing some leftover pasta Logan tosses it into the microwave and watches it intently as it makes the circle over and over again. He forces himself to think about something other than the circles he spun as he crashed with Oscar, he’d been doing that every night before he went to sleep and in the first 30 minutes he was awake in the morning. He would fall asleep again after.
The microwave beeps three times and Logan sits at his kitchen counter to eat. There isn’t much else he has to do with his time, both Alex and Zhou have been spending their break on the other side of the world in their respective home countries. Lance was back in Canada but they were planning on meeting up later during the break anyways.
The fats in the butter have separated from the rest of the sauce and it quite frankly looks unappealing. Logan forces it down anyways.
Once his weird amalgamation of lunch and dinner is done, Logan drags himself to the washroom to brush his teeth. He pointedly ignores looking at himself in the mirror, instead opting to stand at an awkward angle half facing the door as if he would have to start running at any moment.
Logan pulls the covers over himself the moment he enters the room, the bed is still unmade from this morning but he can’t find it in him to care anymore.
He doesn’t even close his eyes anymore, he knows what he will see.
Who he will see.
Oscar had stared at him the entire ride back to the Paddock and as much as Logan had missed him he couldn’t help but feel exposed under Oscar’s gaze.
He had stopped Logan before they split to go to their respective garages asking him if he was okay. Logan had answered with a “Yeah” along with a soft smile to hopefully convey that he truly was fine. Oscar had still looked at him unconvinced.
If anything Logan should have been the one to ask Oscar if he was okay. His hair was all messed up, but that was a given because it had been under the helmet for the better part of an hour. Oscar also had dark circles under his eyes and Logan remembers seeing them from across the paddock for the past few months.
He opens his mouth to say something else, their first time alone since Miami.
It’s interrupted by someone from Logan’s team coming to get him.
He leaves Oscar standing next to the stark white FIA building, and when he turns back he can’t see the papaya race suit anywhere.
Logan exits the paddock late in the day after a million crash debriefs.
And Oscar still one point ahead of him.
——
Logan flies to Greece in the middle of summer to meet up with Lance.
It’s hot and bright and crowded, Logan has never been more thankful to not get recognized as he gets into the rental car and starts his drive over to meet his friend. He arrives late in the day and just has enough time to drop his bags into his room and take a quick shower before heading downstairs.
“Hey mate, how’s it going!” Lance says as they meet for dinner.
“It’s been good,” Logan responds. “Just been doing whatever y’know.”
Thankfully Lance does, and the more the two talk the more Logan realizes that he’s missed having a friend on the grid. He and Lance had become unlikely friends after talking on the Drivers parade a couple times and Logan had underestimated how much the two of them had in common. It helped that Lance was the one to take the first step, but the two of them had been texting back and forth pretty consistently and Logan was happy to call him a friend.
Dinner was fun, and after promises to actually do something tomorrow the two of them split up for the night which is how Logan found himself sitting in the middle of his bed with nothing to do.
He finds himself opening his App Store to redownload Instagram. A horrible choice, but the entire dinner had been Logan waiting for the other shoe to drop. Might as well get it over with.
Logan watches the download ring complete around the app and hesitantly clicks it open once it loads. He watches as the number of notifications in his messages rise slowly until it hits 26.
So maybe he forgot to tell a couple people that he was going to be offline. Logan didn’t think they’d care anyways.
He quickly opens Lances chat to repost the story, a nice view of the ocean, on his own.
Feeling a bit brave Logan makes his way over to Alex’s page where he’s vacationing in the Caribbean with George and Lando apparently. He wonders how that is going considering Alex had just overtaken George for p4 in the drivers championship last race. Logan can’t help but feel a bit bad for George considering his crash was part of the reason he had dropped all the way to p9 because of an untimely pitstop right before. Logan comments a ‘Looks fun mate, I’ll see you soon’ before switching over to Liam’s and then Zhou’s.
Liam had been spending his time in New Zealand and Zhou was still in China with his family. Becoming adventurous, Logan switches to his feed and spends the next 20 minutes scrolling.
Logan feels silly by the time he makes it back to the main page. No one had been calling him a bad driver for the crash, the FIA had deemed it a racing incident and the general populous seemed to agree with that. With a couple people saying that ‘real racing was back’. He must have spoken too soon, because by the time he clicks back his home feed has updated there’s a giant photo of Oscar’s face in front of him.
It’s true that him and Oscar had never unfollowed each other, to be honest Logan didn’t know how to and he most certainly did not want to be the first one to admit the friendship truly was over.
So really it’s Logan’s fault that he’s now looking at Oscar’s summer post, more specifically the time he spent with Pedro Acosta.
They’ve been in Spain going karting and riding gp bikes around and if Logan was in the mood to be honest with himself he would have probably enjoyed spending a summer with motorbikes.
Enjoy spending a summer with Oscar.
But he’s not with Oscar, and he’s not even in Spain.
Logan is in Greece and he really wants to go to bed.
He opens up his and Oscar’s WhatsApp thread instead. The last message being a ‘Congrats on the Cadillac contract’ from Oscar. The one before being his own after Oscar had won the wdc last year. Logan had only gotten a thanks in return.
Scrolling up he is hit with the amount of plans Logan had tired to make or had made which eventually got canceled because Oscar accidentally had other things to do. Logan stopped asking after a while.
Stopped texting all together not long after that.
He keeps back-reading to before Formula 1 together, when even though the two of them were separated they had texted for hours on end every single day.
Logan has done this before, he doesn’t know why he can still feel his heart break every time.
Anticlines inherently are extremely hard to form in the first place.
If any one event happens out of order, or is skipped. The structure won’t even form at all.
The most common reason an anticline won’t form however is simply because of the pressure.
The pressure which must push from both sides of the axial plane or else the complex fault zone will fully tip over and what will be created is a fold instead. The pressure must also be the same level on either side in order to maintain the curve of the layers perfectly. The rock layers must also be able to withstand the internal pressure while also accounting for any of the external weight such as plant life or even water pressure.
If any of these fail to hold the formation will either collapse into itself inwards or breaks outwards, if its inwards you will luckily only be left with an uneven boundary. The rock layers will continue trying to fix itself, unable to properly fit over the previous ones.
But at least no one would notice.
If it breaks outwards the entire anticline gets revealed, layers on top of layers of curved and unusual rock formations. Something that had managed to exist unnoticed suddenly under immense review.
The worst part is that it all happens in an instant.
You have no control over this.
You just kept trying to build over it until one day it breaks down and your flaws are on display for everyone to see.
Both ways the anticline ceases to exist.
Something that had formed thousands of years ago from the slightest mistake.
That had existed to protect you.
Gone in an instant.
Most anticlines stay hidden until the pressure properly flattens them back out.
You could have as well.
But no one else ever thought you could do well under pressure in the first place
And now you aren’t so sure you can either
Not against him at least.
Logan should text Oscar.
He isn’t sure he knows how to anymore