74

Marianna POV

By Saturday morning I have a system.

7 AM: soft tissue work on the shoulder before Duane goes anywhere near the car. Twenty-five minutes, no shortcuts, posterior capsule first then AC joint compression and the neck work he still tries to rush because he finds it uncomfortable in ways he won't name. 7:30: taping. I've been practicing the shoulder taping technique since Montreal—there's a specific configuration for rotator cuff support under high G-load that Dr. Lindholm showed me, and I've adapted it for his particular injury pattern, adding a second anchor strip over the AC joint that gives him maybe fifteen extra degrees of pain-free rotation. He doesn't say thank you. He looks at the finished tape job in the mirror with the expression of a man conducting a structural assessment, rotates his arm experimentally, and nods once.

I'm learning that from Duane, a single nod after a treatment is the equivalent of a standing ovation.

Then he goes to qualifying and I go to find coffee in the Veloce hospitality unit, which is enormous and corporate and smells like espresso and synthetic ambition.

Marco calls at eight forty-five.

"How is he," Marco says, not a question.

"Shoulder's bad but manageable. He'll qualify."

"Obviously he'll qualify, it's Duane." A pause. "How is he actually?"

I look at the espresso machine, which is doing something complicated and European. "He's frustrated. He's controlled about it, but underneath the control he's frustrated."

"He hates being limited."

"Every athlete does."

"Duane more than most." Another pause, longer. "He called me last night. After you arrived."

I go still.

"He said Kinetic sent someone good," Marco says carefully. "He said the shoulder was being managed well."

"That's accurate."

"Mari."

"I'm just noting it," he says, and hangs up.

Qualifying happens in two parts, because Silverstone insists on weather drama and delivers it faithfully: dry for Q1 and Q2, then a moving rain front that clips the circuit during Q3 and turns the last eight minutes into a lottery that only the very brave or very precise can win.

Duane is both.

I watch on a monitor in the Veloce hospitality suite, standing toward the back where nobody is paying attention to me, holding a coffee I've forgotten to drink. Around me, engineers and press and team partners are doing the watching-a-sporting-event thing—tense, collective, the held-breath quality of people who have skin in the outcome.

On screen, the cars navigate a circuit that's half-dry and half-not, picking lines through the damp patches with varying degrees of success. Two drivers run wide at Copse. One tags the barrier at Vale and limps back to the pits. The conditions are genuinely dangerous in the way that makes my palms sweat and my clinical brain run accident scenarios it hasn't been asked to run.

Then the 01 car comes through.

Watching Duane drive in the wet is different from watching him in the dry. In the dry there's a fluency to it, almost serene, a driver and car that have reached some mutual understanding. In the wet he looks—alive, in a way that's almost alarming. Like the conditions that compromise everyone else simply give him more variables to work with, more information to process, and his brain runs faster on higher-octane inputs.

He finds grip where the track looks like a mirror. He brakes later than seems reasonable and turns in earlier than seems possible and the car does what he tells it to do, obediently, the way that only happens when driver and machine have the kind of trust that takes years to build.

P2.

The hospitality suite exhales.

P2 with a compromised shoulder in mixed conditions against a full field of healthy drivers, and the only reason it's P2 and not P1 is that the Ferrari got its banker lap in before the rain front arrived.

Someone near me says something in Italian that sounds celebratory. An engineer with a Veloce jacket fist-pumps with the restrained joy of a man who processes emotion through data.

I drink my cold coffee and think: He's going to hurt tomorrow.

P2 puts him in the front row. Front row means more wheel-to-wheel contact in the opening laps, more vibration through the steering column, more load on a shoulder that is currently held together partly by athletic tape and partly by Duane Richter's absolute refusal to acknowledge physical limitation as a meaningful concept.

I need to adjust the taping protocol for race conditions.

This is what I think about. Not the qualifying result, not the championship implications, not the fact that the man I've been falling for at an inadvisable rate just put his damaged body through something extraordinary and made it look effortless. I think about the taping protocol, because that's where I can actually do something useful, and doing something useful is how I hold myself together when the alternative is standing in a hospitality suite feeling things I don't have anywhere to put.

The post-qualifying debrief runs until nearly seven. I know this because I'm waiting in the corridor outside the engineering room when the door finally opens and people start filing out with the specific expressions of people who have been looking at data for two hours and need food and air in that order.

Duane comes out last.