Page 97 of Flat Out
The interview room was small,too small, like the walls were leaning in on me.
A single chair under a bank of lights, camera angled dead-on, a boom mic overhead. Behind the monitor, two producers sat like hawks, one smiling too much, the other scribbling on a clipboard. They said it was “just a quick check-in on how the season was going for the rookie.”
Bullshit. It felt like an interrogation, and I was suffocating.
I crossed my legs, sweaty palms flat on my thighs, nails digging through the fabric of my jeans. My body ached. Every muscle screamed for rest, but instead I was here, on display, ready to be the dancing driver this world demanded of me.
The woman producer introduced herself as Clara. She was polished and all smiles that didn’t quite meet her icy blue eyes. She welcomed me to my first season on the grid like I should begrateful for the chance to sit under her microscope. “Why don’t you open with your name and who you race for?”
I looked straight at the camera, pretending to be more poised than I felt. “I’m Aurélie Dubois, and I am a Formula 1 driver for Luminis GP. This is my first season.”
“Let’s start with the race last week, in Austria,” Clara said smoothly from her seat about five feet across from me, conveniently out of the ring of spotlight I was in, but close enough to still feel like an interview. “That radio call, where you said, ‘Fix it. Are you even listening?’”
The monitor to the right of us flickered to life with the replay. My voice was strained, gritty with frustration. My onboard camera showed me holding the car steady as it twitched under me. I flinched, my body recoiling as it recalled the pain.
“Tell us what was going through your mind.”
My mind? My mind was trying to stay focused on not crashing into a fucking barrier. My neck burned, my stomach dipping with each turn, my body reacting to every thousandth of a second I was out there. But none of that could be broadcasted.
So I said in a curt tone, “The car wasn’t right. I needed answers. In the moment, it felt like I wasn’t being heard. I’ve felt that way the whole season, by every official in this sport.”
There.I could use this platform as leverage.
Clara tapped her pen against the notepad in her lap, waiting for more.
The man beside her, a producer with wire-rimmed glasses, leaned forward. “And before Austria, there was Montreal. The crash.” On the screen, the replay rolled: Callum’s car smashing into the barrier. “Some people said you lost composure in that moment. That it showed you weren’t ready for Formula 1. Rookie nerves, if you will.”
What they really wanted to say bled through their words, through their expressions as they glanced at each other, through the barely-hidden smirks.
Because I was a woman, I was too emotional, too soft. Not built for this sport.
And maybe I’d believed it for a second. Because after that argument on the trail, we’d cloaked ourselves in silence. Awkward small talk at dawn, stilted goodnights at dusk. The space between us in bed felt like a chasm. And the worst part? He didn’t try to close it.
It cut deeper because of what had come before. Because I had given him the last part of me I’d ever held back—the final, fragile thread of innocence I’d been saving without even realizing it. My last virginity. The night I let him mark me so completely, I thought nothing could wedge us apart.
Maybe this world really was getting the best of us. Him, refusing to slow down. Me, refusing to bend. And neither of us was willing to admit that protecting ourselves was also protecting what we had together.
But here we were. Him retreating into himself, me spiraling into questions I hated. Was it rookie nerves? Or something deeper, crueler, stitched into my body. The phantom ache low in my belly whispered a reminder I couldn’t silence, that some things weren’t nerves at all. Some things were shadows I’d never escape.
Right now, even sleeping felt too dangerous.
My pulse roared in my ears.Rookie nerves.That was the polite version. The hashtags had been worse: #DownWithDubois, #TheRecklessRookie, #FrasersMistake.
That last one hurt particularly badly.
“I say the regulations matter,” I responded evenly, as if my insides weren’t currentlyraging. “A man loses his cool, and he’s fiery, passionate. I lose mine, and suddenly I don’t belong. Iflagged issues before that race. I’ve flagged them since. If the FIA won’t enforce their own safety standards, then it’s not nerves, it’s negligence.”
“Yet people online—” Clara started.
“Yes.” It came out harsher than I meant it to. “I know what people online say. I’ve read it all. That I’m worthless, that I’m just here because of Callum or my brother, that I should spend more time driving than advocating. I started speaking up because I was tired of watching women get ignored in this sport. And I’ll keep speaking up, whether anyone listens or not.”
A silence fell. They would probably splice this into something dramatic later.
“And Callum?” the man next to Clara pressed. The screen showed him in the Vanguard garage in Austria, watching the monitors with a calculated look. “He seemed… concerned.”
Concerned. That wasn’t the word. He’d been furious, desperate begging me without words to survive that race.
I could still feel the echo of his voice from our run in the countryside two days ago. His pleas, the way it pricked at my skin.How can there be a future for us if you kill yourself by climbing back into that car?
