Chapter Text
here we go again...
The clip landed in the smaller chat with no explanation, because it did not need one.
Media pen. Max. A question about the upcoming season, only loosely related to Ferrari, and within seconds he had swerved neatly round it and volunteered, to nobody’s surprise and everybody’s despair, that he just hoped Ferrari would finally give Charles a decent car because he wanted to race him properly again.
for fuck’s sake
Max said these things as though they were obvious. As though it were the most natural thing in the world to speak into a microphone and publicly yearn for better machinery under Charles Leclerc.
they cannot keep doing this to us
By now nobody in the little offshoot therapy group even bothered asking why. The real question was why they still kept being surprised by the specific form it took.
And Charles, which was worse, never helped.
someone please find me one interview where he does not end up talking about max
Nobody did, because nobody could.
Charles had spent years smiling that mild Ferrari-prince smile and calmly explaining how long he and Max had known each other, how well they understood each other, how much history there was there, until the information no longer felt learned so much as engraved somewhere on the inside of everybody else’s skull.
they really do talk like the other one lives in their walls
That got several immediate reactions, mostly because it was true.
The small chat had only come into being after the main one proved structurally incapable of handling the Verstappen-Leclerc issue with any degree of emotional safety. The main chat could survive track limits arguments, tyre complaints, stewarding rows, even the occasional existential spiral about strategy. What it could not survive indefinitely was the recurring experience of one of those two saying something faintly unhinged about the other in public and everybody else having to act as though this were professionally proportionate.
So now there were two places for it. The main chat, where one still occasionally attempted dignity. And this one, where dignity came to die.
A photo appeared.
Three faces in the cooldown room. Pale. Blank. Watching the screen.
oh no not this one
It had been from that race where neither Max nor Charles had made the podium, and yet the replay they were all being made to sit through was the pair of them fighting over fifth place as if the world championship itself were somehow hidden inside it and only they knew it. The top three had looked less like men enjoying a quiet post-race sit-down and more like witnesses to a roadside emergency.
why do they do this if there is no trophy involved
to be fair they do it when there is a trophy involved too
That, depressingly, was also true.
Another photo followed later. Podium this time. Max and Charles both there, already turned half towards each other while the third driver stood beside them with the expression of a man who had just realised too late that he had been placed in the middle of somebody else’s recurring psychological event.
he looks like a hostage in a sponsor cap
The problem was never just the racing. Plenty of drivers raced hard. Plenty respected one another. Plenty said nice things into microphones and then got on with trying to ruin each other’s afternoons next weekend. But these two kept doing something worse: they defended each other’s logic.
One of the clips that did permanent psychic damage involved Max making a move half the field had instantly labelled too aggressive, because of course they had. Only for Charles to turn up in the media pen later, smiling, and slide straight into that usual polished Ferrari PR mode of his.
no because that is the bit i hate most
The smile. The tone. The careful phrasing. The faint suggestion that he was about to smooth the whole thing over. The chat had seen this often enough to know exactly what was coming, and still went through the same horrible process every time: unwrapping the silk, sentence by sentence, until they got to the hard centre of it and realised that, yet again, he was saying exactly what Max would have said, only in a form polite society could survive.
Max hurled his opinions like furniture. Charles gift-wrapped them and set them gently on the table.
do you think they know how weird they are?
probably
do you think they care?
absolutely not
By the time the season settled into shape, the rest of the field had stopped treating this as a pattern and started treating it as weather. Max and Charles did this. They found each other, defended each other, talked about each other, translated each other for the media, and generally behaved like two men who saw no contradiction in being each other’s favourite opponent and everyone else’s administrative burden.
Then Ferrari gave Charles a real car.
That should have improved things.
It made them significantly worse.
An image dropped into the small chat from parc fermé: Charles victorious, finally in possession of the sort of Ferrari people had been threatening the rest of the field with for years, and yet standing there with his head tilted slightly towards second place, looking not pleased exactly, but dissatisfied in a way nobody could immediately parse.
why does he look like that?? he won
Ten minutes later someone added a screenshot from the cooldown room.
Same race. Same Charles. Same face.
oh he’s actually annoyed
At first the little therapy group could not answer that. Max furious in a difficult Red Bull was legible to everyone. Charles Leclerc being visibly underwhelmed by winning, however, was a fresh administrative crisis.
Then the clips started lining up.
Corner entries left a fraction too open. Braking zones that should have been shut remained just loose enough to count as invitations if you were the sort of person who found that kind of thing inviting. Tiny windows appeared and vanished. Charles kept offering moments that looked, to the rest of the field, unnervingly like attempted manslaughter.
I am not doing that for P2
I enjoy being alive actually
And gradually the shape of it emerged.
He was not dissatisfied with the win. He was dissatisfied with the lack of a fight.
Worse: he seemed to be trying to extract a very particular kind of fight from people fundamentally unequipped to provide it. Charles had spent long enough measuring himself against Max that now, in a car finally worthy of him, he was trying to draw Max-type racing out of men who quite reasonably preferred not to die on a Sunday.
That was when somebody from the little chat, overestimating both their courage and the emotional stability of the main one, took the question next door.
why is charles angry when he is winning races?
The answer came back much faster than anyone wanted.
From Max.
because you lot aren’t racing him properly
The main chat stalled for a full beat.
oh good lord go away
Max, naturally, stayed.
I don’t understand what your problem is
Which was bad enough. Worse was that he plainly meant it. To Max this was not mysterious at all. Charles had a quick car. The opportunities were there. The rest of them simply were not doing enough with them.
we are not you
Max shot back.
clearly
That started a brief and deeply unproductive cross-chat migration, with half the therapy group now hovering in the main thread pretending they were not desperate to see what he would say next.
we are not dying for a title either
Max came back at once.
of course he’s dissatisfied
And there it was.
Not only irritation. Not only that he thought they were all failing to give Charles a proper race. Beneath it sat something sharper and much less comfortable for everybody involved.
what i wouldn’t give for that
That shut people up more effectively than anything else he had said.
Because there it was, in six words: not just contempt for the field’s caution, but envy. He was not envying the winner. He was envying whoever had finished second and failed to use the opportunity properly. He wanted that car. That position. That chance. He would have given half an arm to be close enough to go at Charles properly in exactly those circumstances.
The small chat lit up again instantly.
soooo he’s not even angry for himself anymore he’s angry for charles
this is somehow worse
Then, inevitably, somebody said what everyone else had already been thinking.
there would be bloodshed
That sat in the small chat for perhaps two seconds before somebody else answered.
there wouldn’t
And that was the unbearable part, because it was true. For all that Max and Charles drove at each other like men with an unresolved issue, they trusted one another in ways the rest of the field found frankly alarming. They looked after each other perfectly well. They just did it at a distance everyone else classified as medically irresponsible.
they measure safety in centimetres and expect us to call that normal
Another clip appeared.
No caption.
Charles, post-race, after winning. Calm. Mild. Entirely too pleased with himself. Explaining that, actually, the race had been a bit boring because the fight had been too short, but that terse stretch after the pit stops with Max had been interesting, because he had known exactly when Max would look in the left mirror, and so he had gone the other way.
The small chat went silent first.
Then the main one did.
Then, from somewhere in the smaller thread:
is he saying the highlight of his win was a brief max encounter after the stop
nothing else happened to him apparently
Which would already have been intolerable had Max not chosen that moment to make it catastrophic.
unbelievable
For one beautiful second half the grid thought he meant Charles.
He did not.
What followed was not quite a rant and not quite a tutorial, but some compact, deeply insulting Verstappen masterclass on all the things the various runners-up could have done, at bare minimum, to at least preserve the appearance of a proper fight. A move here. A later brake there. At least make him work for it. At least make it look real.
Someone objected that they had fought, actually.
Max took that personally too.
Not for himself.
For Charles.
The little therapy chat, by this point, was not coping.
he’s offended on charles’ behalf
that should not be allowed
Fernando, who had been watching the whole collapse with indecent enjoyment, chose that moment to contribute.
This is excellent.
That got more reaction than it deserved, mostly because everyone could hear the smile on it.
And so the first half of the season passed in the now familiar rhythm of collective deterioration: Charles turning his own boredom into everybody else’s problem, the rest of the grid refusing on entirely reasonable grounds to die for second place, and Max reacting each time as though they had failed some simple, obvious test of character.