Page 25 of Fast & Reckless
“How the hell did that happen?”
“Fucking track debris,” Will snapped. He was fresh off the track from qualifying, still in his race suit, his hair damp from sweat. He’d never tracked her down after the race in Bahrain to go do “one fun thing.” Demands from the media had consumed his time, which was exactly what she’d expected. And considering the twinge of disappointment she’d felt, it was probably a good thing that he was now too busy for her. Safer that way.
“Street tracks,” Harry growled. “Absolute menace.”
So that’s what Pen meant about street tracks. She might be relentless, but she was rarely wrong.
“Can we repair it on site?” Paul asked.
Harry shook his head. “No. Shredded. It’ll need replacing.”
Several of the engineers who’d been monitoring the race from their desks rose to join the conversation.
Paul groaned. “We don’t have a spare here, do we?”
“Didn’t get it finished in time to make the Melbourne pack out,” David interjected. “It had a flaw. Had to scrap it and start over.”
Harry rubbed his palm over his stubbly jaw. “I can work up some sort of replacement here but—”
“I’ve already run quali,” Will said. “I’m in parc fermé. If we swap out for something different, I’ll get hit with a penalty.”
This was bad. Once a car starts qualifying, no substitutions of parts were allowed before the race the next day. Any replacements needed to match the specs of the original exactly, or the car would be penalized and forced to start from the pit lane.
“Where’s the spare now?”
“Still back at the factory,” David said.
“It’s over twenty hours from Heathrow to Melbourne,” Paul mused. “We’d never get it here in time for tomorrow.”
“Fuck,” Will groaned, turning away to pace the confines of the small mobile office. “I finally have a car I can drive and I’ll be starting from the goddamned back of the grid. This cannot be happening.”
Mira’s heart started beating rapidly, and her mind raced. This could kill Will’s season—Lennox’s season—before it even started.
Will’s race in Bahrain had been fine; he finished tenth. Not an embarrassment but nowhere near what he was capable of. In a car designed for someone else though, there were limits to what he could accomplish. This was the race that was supposed to change everything. But not if they had to switch out parts while in parc fermé.
Mira stared at her notepad, trying to see a solution to an impossible problem. There were only two matches to the brake duct in Will’s car—the one in Matteo’s, which was no help, or the backup back at the Lennox factory in England. It was no use. There was no way she could get it here in time.
Except …
“Wait!” Every pair of eyes in the room turned to stare at her. “Ohmygod, ohmygod! It’s not at the factory. It’s in Singapore!”
Paul scowled. “What? Are you sure?”
Mira nodded as she flipped through one of her folders. “I thought I saw it on the manifest for the advance shipment to Singapore … Ha! Here!” She ripped the manifest free and handed it to her father.
She’d been cc’d on an email from one of the guys back at Lennox to the shipping department, explaining they’d just finished the spare brake duct, but since they’d missed the last shipment to Melbourne, they’d put it in the Singapore advance container instead.
Paul, Harry, David, and Will hunched over the manifest. “There it is,” Paul muttered. “How long is the flight from Singapore?”
“Seven and a half hours,” she supplied. “Give or take.”
“Can we courier it in?” David asked.
Paul glanced at his watch. “It would take too long to get someone out there.”
“We could put one of our boys in Singapore on a plane with it,” Harry suggested. “It’s not that big. It’ll fit in a carry-on.”
Paul shook his head. “The guys in Singapore don’t have Australian visas—”
