Chapter Text
The thing about losing to Lewis Hamilton is that it never feels like just losing.
Losing to Lando feels like losing. Losing to Charles feels like losing. Even losing to George -which Max would prefer not to do and tries very hard not to do - feels like a clean, identifiable thing. A result. A data point. Something to pick apart in the debrief and file away and do better next time.
Losing to Lewis feels like something that was always going to happen, like the world rearranging itself into its natural order. Like Lewis won't even let him have the consolation of surprise. Like he looked at Max across the grid all weekend and already knew, and Max had spent the entire race trying to prove him wrong and hadn't managed it, and now he has to stand on the second step of the podium with that specific taste in the back of his throat - not exactly bitterness, not exactly something else - and watch Lewis lift the trophy above his head like he's done it a hundred times, which he has.
Which is, specifically, the problem.
Max has his own four titles. He knows what it is to win. He's stood on that top step more times than most drivers ever will, and he's never once stopped wanting it, never once looked at the number on the trophy and thought that was enough. He doesn't think Lewis has either. That's the thing nobody outside this sport ever quite understands - that you can win everything and still feel it like a wound every time someone else wins more.
He claps Lewis on the shoulder on the podium because that's what you do. Lewis turns and looks at him, and for a second - one second, brief enough that Max can pretend it didn't happen - something passes between them that isn't hostility and isn't friendliness and isn't the careful professional respect they perform for cameras. Something that has been there a long time, filed under other headings, never examined directly.
Lewis nods at him, small and real.
Max looks away first.
The press conference is where it happens.
Max is still in his racing suit, which in hindsight he will think about a lot - the fact that he didn't even have time to change, that he was still carrying the physical evidence of the race on his body when Christian made the announcement. He's sitting with the usual post-race arrangement of journalists and cameras and the particular kind of tired that only happens after Abu Dhabi, the season-end tired, the kind that should feel like relief and never quite does.
Lewis is two seats away from him. This is also normal. This is the geography of their entire careers.
Christian clears his throat.
"We have some exciting news," Christian says, which is the sentence he uses when the news is going to be controversial and he wants to front-load the reaction, "regarding the 2025 season."
Max picks up the water glass in front of him.
"We're thrilled to announce that Lewis Hamilton will be joining Red Bull Racing as Max's teammate for the upcoming season."
Max puts the water glass down.
He is aware, distantly, of the noise the room makes. He is aware of the cameras swinging toward his face. He is aware of Anna, his PR person, doing something very controlled and deliberate with her expression two seats to his left, which means she already knew and has been waiting for this moment and has prepared for the possibility that Max might say something regrettable.
He doesn't say anything. He looks at the table. He thinks, with the focused clarity of a man whose brain has just performed some kind of emergency shutdown, about the four tenths of a second that separated him and Lewis today. The way Lewis's car moved through Turn 9 in the final stint, that specific line he takes that doesn't look like the fastest option and somehow is. The way he's been watching Lewis drive for fifteen years and still hasn't fully figured him out.
He thinks about the fact that Lewis is going to be in his garage. His data. His team.
"Max," Anna says, very quietly. "They're going to ask you something."
"I know," Max says. He looks up. He puts on the expression. "I think it's a strong choice for the team," he says, into the nearest microphone, in the tone of someone who has been trained to say things like this and means approximately forty percent of them. "Lewis is the best driver of his generation. It's going to be a competitive season."
Lewis, two seats away, says nothing. Max can feel him not saying anything. It has its own specific texture, Lewis's silence - it's never empty, it's always a decision.
The journalist asks Lewis something. Lewis leans forward and says, in that voice that always sounds like he's talking slower than he's thinking, "I'm looking forward to a new challenge. Red Bull have built something incredible. I think Max and I can push each other to do great things."
Max thinks: push each other.
He thinks: great things.
He thinks about the podium, twenty minutes ago, and the one second that wasn't hostility or professionalism or any of the other words he has used over the years to describe what happens when Lewis looks at him.
He picks up the water glass again and drinks the whole thing.
—
His das calls him before he even gets back to the hotel.
"Well," he says.
"Don't," Max says.
"I just think-"
"Dad."
A pause. Jos has a very specific kind of pause, the kind that means he has opinions he is strategically choosing not to share yet. Max has known this pause his entire life. "He's going to try to take everything from you," Jos says, finally, which is one of the opinions Max was expecting.
"He's a teammate, not an enemy."
"In Formula 1 those are the same thing."
"That is genuinely not true."
"Max." His dad says his name like a full sentence. "I know how you get about Hamilton."
Max stops walking. He's in the corridor of the paddock, the noise of the post-race breaking down around him, people moving past with equipment and headsets and the blank expressions of people who have worked very long days. He stares at a point on the wall.
"I don't get a way about Hamilton," Max says.
"Well. Don't let it distract you."
Max hangs up. He stands in the corridor for a moment longer than necessary.
The thing is - and Max does not think about this, and has not thought about this, and will not be starting now - the thing is that Jos isn't entirely wrong. Not the way he means it, probably. But there has always been something about Lewis that doesn't fit cleanly into the category of rival, something that has required a kind of active management, a deliberate not-looking that Max has been performing for so long it has started to feel like looking.
He started watching Lewis race before he was in Formula 1. Everyone did, obviously. Lewis was the sport before Max was even part of it. But there's watching and then there's the specific kind of attention Max paid to Lewis's laps, his lines, the way he carried himself in post-race interviews, exhausted and still precise, still utterly himself. Max told himself it was study. It was, technically, study. It was also something he has never examined closely enough to name.
And now Lewis is going to be in his garage.
Max starts walking again. He has a plane to catch.
—
Lando texts him a video compilation of the internet's reaction. Max watches forty-five seconds of it and then closes his phone and puts it face-down on the seat in front of him.
He opens it again twenty minutes later.
lando: mate are you okay
lando: that was actually insane
lando: like genuinely. lewis hamilton in red bull. YOUR red bull
lando: also you looked a bit like you were having a small stroke at the announcement just fyi
lando: max
lando: max are you alive
Max stares at the messages for a while.
Max: I'm fine
lando: okay but are you FINE fine or are you 'i'm fine' fine because those are very different things with you
Max puts the phone back down. Outside the window there is nothing but dark and the distant lights of whatever city they are passing over, and Max has four titles and a second place finish in Abu Dhabi and a teammate who has been making his brain do strange things since approximately 2010, and none of that is a problem he has any idea how to solve.
He is, technically, fine.
He closes his eyes. He tries to sleep.
He doesn't sleep for a very long time.
—
They don't speak again until the factory. Max arrives early because he always arrives early and sits in the briefing room with his red bull and his notes and the expression he uses when he doesn't want anyone to talk to him, which most of Red Bull has learned to respect.
Lewis arrives exactly on time, which Max didn't expect. He'd expected late, the deliberate late of someone who knows every room will wait for him. Instead Lewis walks in at nine on the dot, wearing something simple, no jewelry except the rings, hair down, and sits across from Max without ceremony. He sets his phone on the table face-down, which Max notices because it's the opposite of what Max does, and opens a notebook, which Max notices because nobody under fifty uses notebooks.
He looks up and finds Max looking at him.
Max looks at his own notes.
The meeting is two hours long. Max retains approximately sixty percent of it, which is worse than his usual retention rate and he is choosing not to think about why. Lewis asks three questions during the technical briefing, all of them specific, all of them the kind that communicate clearly that he has already done the reading. Max asks two questions. They do not look at each other during either of these exchanges.
Afterward the room empties out slowly the way rooms do, conversations carrying people toward the door, and Max stays in his seat because he is trying to finish a thought about the rear wing data and also, if he is being honest with himself, which he is not, because he is waiting to see what Lewis does.
Lewis is the last one still seated. He's writing something in the notebook. Max watches him in his peripheral vision and feels stupid about it.
"You drove well," Lewis says, without looking up. "Abu Dhabi. I mean."
Max blinks. "You beat me by four tenths."
"Yeah." Lewis closes the notebook. "You still drove well."
There is something almost irritating about receiving a compliment from Lewis Hamilton. It doesn't arrive like a normal compliment. It arrives like a fact he's assessed and decided you deserve to have. Max doesn't know what to do with facts he's been assessed as deserving.
"Thanks," Max says, carefully.
Lewis nods once, stands up, picks up the notebook and his phone. He's almost at the door before he pauses, in that way he has, the pause that always feels like a decision.
"This doesn't have to be weird," Lewis says, still facing the door. "If you don't want it to be weird."
Max thinks about 2021. He thinks about every race since 2021. He thinks about standing on podiums next to Lewis and feeling like he was standing too close to something he hadn't figured out how to handle yet.
He thinks about Silverstone, Monza and Abu Dhabi. He thinks about-
"It's not weird," Max says.
Lewis turns and looks at him with that expression - the one that isn't unfriendly, the one that makes Max feel like he is being read very quickly and very accurately - and says: "Good."
He leaves. Max sits in the empty briefing room for a while.
He picks up his notes. He walks to the engineering bay and tries to think about nothing except the car, which has always been the safest place for him, the cleanest, the most honest. The car doesn't ask him complicated questions. The car just goes as fast as he makes it go.
It's going to be a very long season.