How Did I Become an F1 Driver?

It’s already been mentioned earlier that the weather in Austin has been great lately, with basically zero chance of rain.

So today the track was once again basking in bright sunshine.

When Qin Miao appeared at the paddock entrance, the American fans who had come to the venue early started cheering.

Qin Miao naturally smiled and waved to the crowd, which only drew even louder cheers in return.

Soon, Qin Miao returned to the Mercedes team’s motorhome.

The next series of procedures won’t be elaborated on too much, because over the next three days the track’s weather conditions won’t differ much from the race itself.

So the workload for this week’s three practice sessions would be relatively much lighter.

Qin Miao could also devote more of his attention to getting familiar with the track and pushing the car to its limits here.

In FP1 and FP2, the most headache-inducing issue that Qin Miao and Hamilton discovered was how quickly the tyres were wearing on today’s track.

There’s a high probability that in the race all the teams’ drivers will go for a two-stop strategy.

But this doesn’t include Qin Miao; after seeing how the track was chewing up tyres today, he’d already decided to run the whole race on a one-stop yellow-to-white strategy.

The subsequent testing and setup process won’t be described in detail here.

In short, Qin Miao finished all his car setup work for the United States Grand Prix as early as Friday.

Time quickly moved on to Saturday.

In FP3, the two Mercedes drivers didn’t do many laps; each of them was only on track for about half an hour before clocking off early, and the team spent the remaining time starting the engine change ahead of schedule.

Soon it was time for qualifying.

In Q1 and Q2, no one was doing any circus tricks on track; at most, some drivers overshot while chasing the limit in quali and ran off, having their lap times deleted.

But on the next lap, as long as they dialed it back a bit, they could always put in a time that matched their current form.

In the end, there were no particularly surprising results compared to FP1 and FP2.

On the Chinese drivers’ side, Qin Miao steadily skimmed over the Q2 and Q3 cut-off lines at medium-low altitude.

Zhou Guanyu likewise scraped over the cut-off line at ultra-low altitude.

He even knocked Stroll out on his final flying lap and made it into Q3.

Bottas also successfully advanced in ninth, just one position ahead of his teammate Zhou Guanyu.

Now the Alfa Romeo car has basically become a regular in the points; before this season started, no one could have imagined the grid would look like this.

On his first Q3 flying lap, the window the team found for Qin Miao wasn’t great.

As a result, he ran into traffic in the second sector, getting slightly held up by Russell, who had just finished his flying lap and was using the sequence of high-speed corners in sector one to return to the pits.

Although Russell did move aside for Qin Miao at the time, in the drivers’ briefing before the race, basically all the drivers had agreed that during warm-up laps or out-laps they wouldn’t lift through that sequence of corners in sector one.

The key point is, Russell is the chairman of the drivers’ committee, and this gentleman’s agreement was proposed by him in that briefing.

Now he was the one blocking Qin Miao’s flying lap on track—there’s really no better word than "abstract" for that.

Because of Russell’s obstruction, Qin Miao’s sector one time was actually slower than his half-hearted Q2 flying lap, by 0.08 seconds.

But in the next two sectors, Qin Miao held his nerve despite the unexpected setback in sector one, went full purple in sector two—which is Mercedes’ comfort zone—and then green in sector three; when he finished that first flying lap, he briefly went to the top of the timing screens.

Still on his cool-down lap after that run, Qin Miao was already on the team radio reporting that Russell had impeded him on track.

But race control didn’t hand out any penalty, because this was only a verbal agreement between drivers, and Russell had moved aside at that spot—there was no malicious blocking.

FIA’s reasoning was perfectly proper, and Qin Miao could only helplessly let it go.

And just as Qin Miao finished making his complaint, before he’d even had time to warm the seat at the top of the standings, a late-charging Hamilton knocked him off P1.

Even though the Old Man didn’t go purple in any of the three sectors, his combined average over the three was still 0.1 seconds quicker than Qin Miao’s.

While the two Mercedes drivers were busy scrapping with each other in qualifying, the two Ferrari cars also unleashed their pace.

Leclerc banged in triple purple sectors and stormed into P1 with a time 0.2 seconds faster than Hamilton in second.

Sainz was a bit slower than his teammate Leclerc, but he still put himself up into P2.

Looking at Ferrari’s pace, Qin Miao felt a bit of a headache coming on.

Wasn’t Ferrari supposed to have been killed off by TD039 this season? How is their car still this fast?

Obviously, no one could give Qin Miao an answer to that question.

After going back to the team garage for a short reset, when there were 3 minutes left before the end of Q3, the drivers all filed out of the pits to start their final flying laps of the United States Grand Prix qualifying.

Honestly, that flying lap felt pretty good for Qin Miao; thanks to all the practice and familiarisation work before the weekend, plus the two practice sessions and five quali flying laps, he’d long since ingrained the technique for every corner of the Circuit of the Americas into muscle memory.