Chapter 10 God of Throttle

Chapter 10 God of Throttle
Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, 7:11 a.m.
The sky was still a pale wash of blue when the first engine roared, splitting the cold air like a knife through ice. In the Bandini GP paddock, everything moved in a strangely tidy symphony—crew in headsets, hands full of grip charts, monitors blinking awake in unison with RPM graphs and lap times two minutes into the day.
The red-and-black Bandini sat on the grid in the morning light, gleaming like a weapon. The wind carried the sting of gasoline, the chatter of air guns, and the hard clang of metal on metal, a soundtrack that felt like war drums. Other paddocks were waking up too, just not as fast as Bandini.
Because Bandini had Rafael.
And Rafael always showed up early. Always set the pace first. Always made the other teams feel late before they even sat down to breakfast.
I cut across the paddock with a clipboard in my left hand and a headset hanging off my neck. My white shirt was already half wrinkled, my boots were dusty, but at least I could still pretend to look composed.
Yevena was parked in our tiny media box, surrounded by three laptops and a tablet. Her face was lit up like a kid who’d just been handed an iPad and the home Wi-Fi password.
“Vick. Listen to this,” she said, rapid-fire, eyes glued to the screen. “The video of Rafael tapping Alex’s chin and saying ‘good luck, pretty boy’ before he left the pit? 3.8 million views in six hours.”
I raised a brow. “And the fanfiction?”
Yevena nodded. “Two. One of them is in Polish.”
Of course it is.
I glanced toward the pit lane. The broadcast cameras were already in position. Rafael sat on the pit wall railing, balaclava halfway on, still worrying at a glove with his teeth. His suit was unzipped to the waist, showing a throat and a line of chest that—God help me—looked like page one of a sin catalog.
He flicked his eyes to me and lifted a brow.
I shot back a flat look. You know exactly what you’re doing, De Luca.
“Our followers are up a hundred and fifty thousand this week,” Yevena chattered on behind me. “Rafael has two trending hashtags on TikTok. One of them is #GodOfThrottle.”
I sighed and flipped open the clipboard. “If he starts selling his backwash, we’re leaving motorsport and becoming an agency.”
“Co-signed.”
One of the tech crew hustled past and nodded. “Morning, Miss Alvarez.”
I nodded back. “Make sure the onboard camera is live from lap one. I don’t want dead footage like last year.”
“Double-checked.”
The second Rafael slid into the cockpit, the air changed. Like the paddock itself knew he was there. The head engineer started the countdown. The lights blinked on, one by one.
I stood at the back of the control room with my arms folded. On the screen, Rafael’s red-and-black helmet filled the frame. The visor hid his eyes, but I knew the face he was making—cool, locked in, lethal. A wolf right before it runs.
The car slipped out of the pit.
Four seconds later, the first lap time hit the screen. Alex hadn’t even sat down in his cockpit yet.
“He’s insane,” one engineer muttered. “But brilliant.”
I kept quiet.
Not because I disagreed. Because that sentence could carry a lot of weight where Rafael De Luca Ricciardi was concerned.
Not just the way he took a corner.
But the way he once—eight years ago—took my heart, then left like a final lap that didn’t need a victory parade.
On the screen, he snapped through Turn 10. Clean. Perfect.
I wrote down the time.
And tried not to write down the way my pulse, annoyingly, picked up to match it.
Lap four.
The morning wind sharpened, needling the back of my neck and slipping under my headset, but none of us moved from the monitors. Three screens in the control room bloomed with telemetry, sector speeds, throttle trace, brake angles. Red lit up every split.
“He just touched a 1:16.2,” a data engineer breathed, barely audible under the mouse clicks and the engine drone from the pit wall. “That’s... four tenths faster than his best here last season.”
I cut him a look. “You sure the data’s clean?”
“Cross-checked twice.” He stared at me, eyes wide. “It’s not just clean. It’s absurd.”
Absurd. The perfect word. Because it wasn’t just our crew realizing something insane was happening.
Behind the glass wall of the media room, the Channel F1 crew covering the pre-season test suddenly moved faster. Someone pressed a hand to their earpiece, swung the camera toward the Bandini pit, and another producer pointed to the big screen showing the lap data.
“Are you seeing this?!” a voice shouted from inside the soundproof room. “He’s destroying his own record. With a brand-new car. On a cold track.”
I didn’t need subtitles. Shock was a universal language.
On the pit wall, Rafael sat perfectly still in the cockpit. His helmet didn’t move, but the data told me everything. He hadn’t even touched the brakes past sixty percent. His hands were smooth. Precise. And yes—brilliant.
The red-and-black Bandini carved through the final corner, leaving a thin trace of smoke. The onboard camera caught him from behind, his neck barely shifting—pure concentration. Then the finish line.
The lap time flashed across the big screen: 1:15.89
I went still.
Alex, in the other car, hadn’t even touched 1:18.
Someone behind me cursed in Italian. Yevena, now somehow standing right beside me, stared at her tablet with wide eyes.
“The hashtag #BandiniBlessed just exploded. And F1 TV posted a GIF of Rafael with the caption ‘Holy. Fck.’—all caps.”
Of course they did. Because anything Rafael touched could go viral in three seconds flat and trigger a minor existential crisis across four rival teams.
I looked back toward the pit.
Rafael finally rolled into the lane, the car slowing with a hiss. The tech crew swarmed instantly, but he didn’t climb out right away. He just sat there, fingers still wrapped around the wheel, like he was still chewing on the taste of the win he’d just created.
Then he lifted his visor.
Those eyes—the ones that hadn’t really left my memory in eight years—looked straight through the control room glass. And then, as if he knew exactly where I was standing, he smiled. Just a little. Half of one. And winked.
The bastard.
The crew behind me tried not to laugh. A girl from the documentation team dropped her notepad. Yevena rolled her eyes.
“I’m printing shirts that say I survived eye contact with Rafael De Luca Ricciardi,” she muttered.
I exhaled, flipped open my notebook, and scrawled one line in bold ink:
PR: Damage Control. Rafael’s Lap Time + Viral Risk = Mixed Blessing.
Because while the rest of the world saw a god behind the wheel, I—unfortunately—saw more than that. I knew he could break more than records.
He could break the people who thought they were immune.
Including me.