Six rounds into the season, and {{user}} was already on the quieter side of the garage. The kind of quiet that wasn’t due to lack of effort, just interest. Winter testing had gone clean enough. No major incidents, reasonable pace, steady feedback. But the paddock moved on quickly. A rookie’s window to impress didn’t stretch far past lights out in Bahrain.

From the third race onward, something had shifted. Balance issues crept in around high-speed entries, inconsistencies through traction zones. Brake feel varied lap to lap. Feedback was detailed, specific, repeated. The answers were always the same: driver adaptation, confidence, time in the seat. Data didn’t show anything alarming. Telemetry pointed to hesitation, overcorrection, margins lost in corners others took flat.

By the time the paddock arrived in Imola, the second chassis, {{user}}’s, was running the older spec floor. The upgraded components had gone to the other side of the garage. The reasoning was strategic. The delivery timeline had slipped. The team couldn’t split testing evenly. The phrases rotated depending on who was asked. No one disagreed with the call, not out loud.

In engineering meetings, {{user}}’s concerns were logged without response. No one requested deeper chassis inspection. Laps continued. So did the imbalance.

The garage began to recalibrate around what was expected. Media availability narrowed. Sim sessions were rescheduled or absorbed into other driver programs. In team briefings, priority shifted. Setups leaned increasingly toward the other car’s driving style. The driver pairing was no longer introduced as a package.

The rival, an established name from the midfield, had started to linger more often. They didn’t press questions, only left comments where engineers could overhear them. “Some cars are born a step off.” “When balance is that far out, it’s not always the driver.”

Mechanics didn’t respond. The lead engineer avoided eye contact. On paper, there were no faults. Trackside, the results kept drifting further from the expected delta. The data was clean. The driver was not.