Faith had slept through his return late in the evening, and Kenny slept through her departure on Saturday morning. In the evening, he seems excited, but she does not care.

  On the day of the race, everyone is looking at the sky and the weather forecast in despair. It might be dry – or it might rain. Three hours before the race, they still do not have a plan.

  Faith is philosophical about it at first. The weather is going to hit everybody the same. Her team is in uproar. Tom and the drivers are discussing different strategies very agitatedly. Should they go out on slicks or intermediates or bad weather tyres? Bad weather tyres would slow them down. Slicks might be risky. One hour before the race they are still undecided.

  In the end it is Faith who makes a decision. “We’ll start on slicks. It’s no use to be behind from the start.”

  Slicks it is, and the race starts off in dry conditions.

  In the ninth lap things become heated. Finally, the data from the weather forecast and the clouds begin to align.

  “Let’s wait some more”, Tom says, but Faith overrules him. The cars are still close together. The drivers are waiting for orders. They ought to change now, at once, and if it rained, they would be good. “Sandro, you come in in two laps. Deniz stand by. We’re changing to rain.”

  The crew have already put the heating blankets on the tyres. Tom looks at her and grins. “We either win this thing, or we make complete fools of ourselves.”

  The rain starts when Sandro has been on his new tyres for half a lap.

  “Deniz, come in at once.”

  Everybody in the pit lane is running in circles. Every team is setting up to call in their drivers now. There is so much traffic that getting into and out of the pit lane is dangerous. There is an accident that takes out three cars, one of Mori among them, but they are not in the way and the race goes on, with Sandro suddenly in first position.

  “Does he know it at all?”, Faith asks.

  “Hard to say”, Tom replies.

  “Should we tell him?”

  “No. Better not. Twenty-seven rounds to go.”

  Faith just tells Sandro his lap times and that he is doing fine. Everything looks stable, there is no sliding, there are no problems.

  “Pity that he has to come in again”, she muses.

  “Everybody has to come in again.”

  With Claymore in the lead, the whole thing feels different. Faith finds it hard to believe, but this is also something she can get into. They have worked for this, they must not mess it up. Twenty-three laps to go.

  In round thirty-four she orders her team to prepare the next stop. The rain has been constant, but again, the predictions are unhelpful. It might stay like this for the rest of the race, or it might stop. If it stopped, the track would dry off quickly, and the tyres would be slow. Sandro’s lead is comfortable enough for one pit stop, but they must pick the right tyres.

  “Sandro, come in in three laps, and we stick with rain. Deniz, come in in two laps, same.” She has to sound confident. This is her team. She is gambling, but so is everybody else. Again, Claymore is ahead of the other teams with their stops, but if Faith does not want to wait, they do not wait.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  Deniz comes out of his stop in thirteenth place, but this is going to even itself out. When Sandro leaves the pit lane, Mori’s driver is approaching from behind. Faith is staring at the screen, holding her breath. This fucking right turn… Mori’s driver has more speed, but Sandro holds out, and keeps his lead.

  “Well done”, she tells him. "You’re in the lead. Eleven laps to go. Don’t get excited.”

  “Alright”, Sandro squawks.

  Faith laughs and looks at Tom, who also grins. Some reporter on the other side of the pit lane, someone with a very good camera and the right instinct, takes a picture at this precise moment, and this picture is going to be on the title page of many a newspaper in the UK on Monday.

  “You can start thinking about what you are going to tell the reporters”, Tom says when there are only three laps left to go.

  “It’s not over until it’s over”, she cautions him, but she, too, knows that even if the rain stops now, Sandro is going to bring it home. Claymore is going to win this under a rainbow.

  This is precisely what happens. Faith congratulates Sandro, who is screaming inside his helmet. Deniz comes in third, best result of the season for him as well. She hugs everybody around her, and they are all clinging to the wall of the pit lane, cheering. On her way to the winners ceremony, she almost hugs Mori when he congratulates her.

  She gets doused in champagne by her drivers, she has not seen this coming. They have to lift her up to the podium when she gets the trophy for her team, there are more hugs, and there are the national anthems, and the fans are going crazy. This is bizarre, but in a good way.

  At the press conference, dried off but sticky, she tries to explain their success. Hard work by many people, an excellent performance from both drivers, and some smart decisions.

  “Who made the decisions to change the tyres so early?”, they ask.

  “I did”, she says. “Why can’t you let me have this?”

  Everybody laughs.

  Somebody asks Mori whether he regrets his decision to let Claymore have his engines.

  “No”, he says. “Why would I? It is good to see that my engines are still doing a good job. That’s what they are for. The race today has been decided elsewhere, though, and this is also racing. Tactics and weather and tyres and timing are also racing. I’m glad to see that my engines are in such capable hands.”

  Faith blows him a kiss, she cannot help it.

  The press people do not let her go. She realizes that it does not make sense to go to Wake Hall tonight. They will go tomorrow. She has to do interviews, get changed for a TV appearance in the evening, and she hardly has got time to talk to Tom, even though there is so much to say. Instead, she arrives back at the hotel very late in the evening, still on adrenaline, but with the exhaustion creeping up on her, while Tom has been organizing the shipment of their stuff to South America and does not pick up his phone.

  Kenny has been sitting in the hotel room all day, working himself into a frenzy and almost snapping when Faith informs him that she has postponed their departure. He is also raging against himself, for not fixing things more properly, and for not asking Liv for her number. He has not seen her anywhere near the hotel again, so she must be on her way to Oban already, and he hates that their plan is being delayed.

  He is angry with Faith when she comes home, and he says that it is because he cannot wait to have her for himself again. She just looks at him and shrugs. He cannot find it in himself to congratulate her.

  In the morning, he is impatient again. He suspects that she has got a good idea by now how broke he really is. He has had to ask her for money while they had been still in France, and since then she has made a point of leaving some cash on the desk when she leaves. This makes her even more of a bitch. But if he wants to make the most of the situation, he has to play along and bide his time until he gets his chance to buy his freedom from her.

  He is relieved when the limo arrives to take him to the heliport. At the heliport, however, he frowns at the sight of Nicholas, who is coming with them.

  “What about him?”, he asks. “Does he come along or what?”

  Faith looks at him patiently. “No races doesn’t mean no work.”

  Then the flight is delayed by another hour, due to phone calls, and the feeling of him not being in control is entirely the fault of his wife.