F1: Starting with a Simulator Master

Chapter 116 Online Carnival

At the Bahrain Sakhir circuit, Friday at 5:30 p.m., the F2 sprint race had started ten minutes earlier.

Without the dazzling lights of an F1 night race, what awaited these rookies was only the terrifying surface temperature of the desert after a whole day of scorching heat, enough to soften even asphalt.

The No. 12 Prema race car cut through the undisturbed, clean airflow on its own, firmly occupying the top position on the timing board.

Behind him was a ten-second-long, completely empty vacuum.

The rookies in the rear group are being tormented by tire temperature and traction.

If you brake a little later, the tires lock up and emit a blinding plume of blue smoke. If you accelerate a bit harder when exiting a corner, the rear of the car will be teetering on the edge of losing control.

In contrast, Luo Xiu was in the lead.

There was no extreme rescue, no tire lock-up, and not even an overly aggressive attempt to take the curb.

This is by no means a visual feast of high-speed racing.

Instead, he was using a tedious, monotonous, even robotic precision to run over the same braking points again and again.

The reshaped neck and core muscle groups effectively withstood the violent lateral G-forces of an F2 race car, preventing the helmet from shaking even slightly.

Because the lead was so outrageous, the broadcast director was forced to change the shot layout, switching the camera angles early on to the cars battling behind for an extended period.

Only during the final minute and forty seconds of the last lap, when the camera focused entirely on the number 12 red and white race car.

For other F2 drivers, Luo Xiu from China was not just fast, but also exuded a suffocating and invincible sense of oppression.

Their feeling was correct.

The race started at 1:30 p.m. on Saturday, the very next day.

Under direct sunlight, the surface temperature of the track reaches its peak.

The road conditions, which were even worse than those in a sprint race, inevitably caused all drivers' lap time curves to fluctuate due to heat decay.

According to Luo Xiu's telemetry data, tire wear was as if it didn't exist. As fuel consumption increased and the race car became lighter, his lap times became faster and faster.

A double victory in both the sprint and the main race, without any suspense.

When Roche's number 12 car crossed the finish line, the one waving the checkered flag wasn't even a regular track steward.

Jeremy Clarkson, the legendary host of Top Gear who was originally only invited to wave the flag for tonight's F1 race, made an exception and went up to the starting grid to wave the checkered flag for this F2 race, for Roche.

Sky Sports commentators summarized after the match, "This wasn't a match; it was a one-sided, utterly devastating massacre. Rosicky dominated Bahrain's F2!"

In the lounge, Luo Xiu had just come out of the locker room after taking an ice bath, holding a red can of room temperature Coke in his hand. The screen was playing the final results of the F1 Bahrain Grand Prix.

Verstappen won as expected, Perez finished second, Sainz took third place, and Leclerc finished fourth.

Red Bull's Mars rover continues to maintain its terrifying dominance.

Luo Xiu's gaze skipped over the bright red podium celebrations and instead focused on the racing cars struggling in the back row in the replay footage.

He noticed Zhou Guanyu and the green Sauber that flashed briefly at the edge of the screen.

At the end of the long straight, just as the engine was about to reach top speed, the race car suddenly and strangely released the throttle prematurely, as if the power had been cut off.

Glide on pine resin.

This is not a mistake, but rather a serious overheating defect in Sauber's car this year.

In order to prevent the engine from blowing up, drivers are forced to ease off the throttle and run into the airflow to cool down on the long straights where they should be pushing for the fastest lap times.

The subsequent footage of them entering the station was even more disastrous.

Because the lug nuts were stuck, it took Sauber a full 5 seconds to remove the right front wheel.

In F1, where pit stops for tire changes take an average of less than 2.5 seconds, those extra three seconds can instantly wipe out any advantage a driver has fought tooth and nail to gain on the track.

Luo Xiu tilted his head back and gulped down half a can of cola.

He stared at the screen expressionlessly.

This is the cruelest part of F1. In this dimension, no matter how talented a driver is, he cannot overcome the fatal flaws in the car's hardware. If the mechanics or the team falter for even a second, all the individual efforts will instantly become a joke in the paddock.

But to the surprise of all broadcasters and investors, what first ignited the social media charts this weekend was not Red Bull's Mars rover's first victory in defending its title in the new season.

He is a Chinese F2 driver who hasn't even had a chance to get his super license yet.

Because of Luo Xiu's unreasonable and overwhelming dominance in the F2 race, the entire F2 race lost its original suspense.

The gap is so large that it's despairing, so despairing that it even makes people feel bored.

Just as this extremely boring atmosphere reached its peak, a bombshell capable of shattering the entire racing world's media landscape was precisely dropped onto the internet.

It was a document that was leaked along with Luo Xiu's super driver's license verification documents—"F1 substitute sparring bounty contract".

The contract didn't disclose many terms, but those few lines were so outrageous that all the racing media that saw it immediately thought it was a clumsy April Fool's joke.

If it weren't for the fact that it was stapled together with the "Super License Special Approval Form" bearing the official seal of the FIA, no one would believe that this thing was real.

This clause is simple and crude, yet it exudes a chillingly extravagant air:

Regardless of the F1 team, if any official driver is unable to participate for any reason, and the team is willing to call up Roche as a substitute driver on the spot.

The team will immediately receive a sponsorship fee of up to 1000 million euros per race, unconditionally!

The release of this document sent the entire motorsport community, both domestically and internationally, and even casual observers who don't usually watch F1, into a frenzy.

Thus, during the brief lull after the Bahrain Grand Prix, bored domestic and international motorsport fans channeled their pent-up fervor into a wildly unsportsmanlike online frenzy that was utterly addictive.

It was an online event called "F1 Drivers' Misfortune Prayer".

[By the urgent decree of Laozi! May any official driver in the paddock suffer from diarrhea! So much so that he can't get out of bed!]

[Heavenly spirits, earthly spirits, please make room for me!]

[God said—Let there be light—and there was light! I said—Let there be a place—so, who the hell wants to make room for God Luo?!]

In domestic racing community forums, the number of posts discussing various cyberpunk techniques has reached tens of thousands, with all sorts of creative jokes emerging endlessly.

Amidst the chaos, one comment was tacitly liked and pinned by hundreds of thousands of car enthusiasts in China.

[Do your thing, settle your scores—but please don't curse the Sauber team! Sending Luo Shen to drive that crappy car is worse than letting him stay home playing on a simulator!]

Meanwhile, Twitter and Reddit abroad are even more unrestrained, filled with posts that directly name and endorse the practices of various wealthy families.

Enthusiastic foreign netizens even used Ece|table to create a detailed list of "Paddock special menus that are most likely to trigger acute gastroenteritis", and frantically tagged the official accounts of various racing teams.

Everyone is guessing which team's driver Luo Xiu will precisely crush next week with his €1000 million sponsorship contract.

In the highly commercialized arena of fame and fortune, Formula 1, team owners and their drivers appear to be comrades-in-arms sharing the same fate. However, when huge capital interests become misaligned, what is honey to one is poison to another. This is a perfect description of the situation.

Compared to the cyberpunk tactics of car enthusiasts on Twitter, the instincts of capital are far more accurate than the curses of car enthusiasts.

Several large overseas gambling groups worked overnight to create extremely detailed betting odds specifically for Luo Xiu.

Among them, the odds for "the next stop, the Saudi Grand Prix, will be a substitute" plummeted within ten minutes of the opening, falling all the way to a bottom of 1:1.05.

In the betting world, this odds are tantamount to the bookmaker announcing through a megaphone that this is an inevitable event.

What's even more interesting is the specific flow of bets placed on each team.

Haas, Williams, and other poorly-funded teams were highly regarded, but the Sauber team was the most terrifying in terms of attracting funds.

After all, everyone knows what the huge "Stake" and "KICK" paint scheme on the Sauber car represents.

That's Sauber's title sponsor this year, Stake, the world's largest cryptocurrency betting giant, and its subsidiary, KICK, a borderline live streaming platform.

With the hype surrounding the €1000 million "proxy contract" and Luo Xiu's consistently dominant performance on the track, the resulting traffic was enough to overwhelm the Stake server, and the gambling funds involved were in the hundreds of millions.

For Sauber, a team that is at the bottom of the rankings, temporarily changing drivers for a car that is consistently underperforming is a sure-fire way to make money.

Gamblers and gamblers all over the world are frantically buying the same script: given Stake's unscrupulous ways, they are absolutely capable of doing something as shady as putting laxatives in their own drivers' water bottles.

Only the vast majority of pure car enthusiasts on the Chinese internet, uncorrupted by gambling, are still naively praying that the worst Sauber will "retreat! retreat! retreat!"

What they don't know is that in the F1 food chain, the lower the team is, the more adept they are at groveling for money.

Fortunately, even gambling giants with hundreds of millions of dollars in their hands cannot predict exactly what will happen in the future.

Meanwhile, in a presidential suite at a high-end hotel in Monaco.

Looking at those "outlaw comments" that were a hundred times more vicious than his daily prayers, Xu Zihang laughed so hard he convulsed and gasped for breath on the sofa.

He took a screenshot of a spoof image labeled "raw marinated seafood + toilet explosion" and shoved it in front of Chen Pengfei.

Chen Pengfei didn't even lift his eyelids, and put on the active noise-canceling headphones with a blank expression, looking at it with a childish disdain.

Ten minutes later, Xu Zihang passed by Chen Pengfei's bedroom on his way to the bathroom. By chance, he discovered that in the half-open door, this professional race car driver and Luo Xiu's physical trainer, who always touted himself with science and cold data, was actually displaying a cybernetic Guan Gong statue on a tablet computer, muttering something like "Sincerity brings results."

This absurd internet frenzy, like a whirlwind, quickly reached the very top of the F1 pyramid.

The F1 starters, who earn millions of euros a year and are usually high and mighty, displayed an extremely comical survival instinct in the face of the unified "curse" from tens of millions of fans below.

The first to join in was Ferrari's Leclerc, who posted a photo on Twitter of himself eating only vegetarian salads for good luck.

Then McLaren's Norris took it a step further, posting a wildly imaginative and hilariously funny GIF.

On the nose of McLaren's No. 4 race car, someone skillfully photoshopped an oriental yellow demon-suppressing talisman onto it, along with a meme of a groundhog screaming for help.

The entire top-level racing world has entered a bizarre, comedic atmosphere of "everyone being on high alert" because of a new F2 star.