Hover Car Racer (31 page)

‘Yes, Dad,’ Jason sighed, shaking his head.

‘Hey look!’ one of his cousins yelled from in front of the TV. ‘You can bet on Jason!’

Everyone turned to see that the TV news was reporting on the gambling odds being offered for the Masters. A representative from the main internet gambling company, InterBet, was summarising the available odds.

Jason was a rank outsider to win the Masters - his odds were the highest of any racer: 1500-to-1.

But what surprised Jason was the amount of different betting options that were available to the keen gambler:

You could bet on Jason making it through Race 1 (100-to-1).

You could bet on him making it to Race 4 (575-to-1).

But then there were the more complex bets.

Jason coming in the Top 3 overall.

Jason coming in the Top 5 overall.

Jason placing in the Top 3 in any race (naturally the odds for Race 1 were shorter than those for, say, Race 3, since he’d have to avoid eliminations to get to Race 3).

Jason placing in the Top 5 in any race.

Jason was a little overwhelmed by it all. He’d always loved racing, but he’d never taken an interest in the gambling side of it.

‘Hmmm. I’m not much of a gambler,’ Martha Chaser said tentatively, ‘but I might just put a dollar on you to win the whole thing. I could buy myself one of those fancy new sewing machines. Mmmm.’

After a time, dinner broke up, and Jason and the Bug went to their bedroom. They wanted a good night’s sleep before tomorrow’s racing.

Before he climbed into bed, though, Jason had a thought - and he went online, checking something… something about the gambling odds on him in Italy.

Hmmm
, he thought, gazing at the screen, before flicking it off.

Then his parents came in, wished him and the Bug good night, switched the lights off, and left.

Jason lay in the dark for a long time - long after the Bug had fallen silent - staring at the ceiling. Then he rolled over to go to sleep.

As he did so, someone came into the bedroom behind him and sat down on the floor between his bed and the Bug’s.

It was their father, Henry Chaser.

‘Boys,’ he whispered, assuming they were asleep. ‘I just wanted you both to know something. I am so very proud of you - not for reaching the Masters, but just for being who you are and conducting yourselves as you have. Tomorrow, win or lose, it doesn’t matter, I still love you both. You just do your best and enjoy the experience. I hope you have the time of your lives.’

Henry sniffed back some tears.

Then he stood up quickly and left the room.

Jason smiled in his bed.

He didn’t know it, but across from him, in the other bed, the Bug was also wide awake and listening.

.

NEW YORK CITY, USA (THURSDAY)

RACE 1: THE LIBERTY SUPERSPRINT

LAP: 1 OF 40

Lightning speed.

Blurring skyscraper canyons.

Slow-falling confetti.

Roaring crowds.

And absolutely
brutal
racing.

Race 1 of the New York Masters introduced Jason to a whole new level of hover car racing.

This wasn’t just
fast
.

It was desperate. You did everything you could to stay out of the bottom four…and stay alive.

The course for the Liberty Supersprint wasn’t dissimilar to the course Jason had raced in the Challenger Race - except that this track never left Manhattan Island, save for the downward run to the treacherous Liberty’s Elbow.

But this course was
tight
, sharp, a never-ending series of right-angled turns up and down Manhattan Island - as a driver, you never got a chance to rest your mind. If you lost your concentration for a second, you’d find yourself missing a turn and skidding out over the demag lights or into a Dead Zone.

In short, Race 1 was murder on mag drives - which was very deliberate. It made taking Liberty’s Elbow even harder.

On the first corner of the race, Etienne Trouveau made a barely-concealed swipe at Jason’s tailfin.

But Jason - wiser from his similar experience at Race School and loving the extra speed of his new-and-improved
Argonaut
- had expected it and he evaded the move with skill.

Welcome back to the big leagues
, was the message. Twisting, turning, banking, racing.

Sixteen racers, but only twelve could progress to Race 2. Fabian shot to the lead -

Closely pursued by La Bomba Romba -

Jason slotted into 14th place, racing hard, yet within range of elimination.

But he liked this course. It suited the light-and-nimble
Argonaut
. The never-ending sequence of short straights
and 90-degree turns suited the smaller cars - in the city, there wasn’t a single street-section long enough for the
heavier big-thruster cars to gather any straight-line speed. Where they gained a slight advantage was on the short
straight leading down to Liberty’s Elbow.

And that was where things got hairy.

LAP: 17 OF 40

On Lap 17, Liberty’s Elbow claimed her first victim.

Kamiko Ideki, running on worn mags at the back of the field and hoping to pit at the end of that lap, lost control taking the notorious left-hand hairpin.

He lost it wide, understeering badly, and pushing his struggling mags to the max, he blew them and flipped - and rolled wildly - tumbling out of the turn, heading at phenomenal speed toward one of the giant horseshoe-shaped hover grandstands that lined the corner, before he was caught - abruptly, instantly - like a fly in a spider’s web in the protective Dead Zone enveloping the Elbow.

Out of the race, Kamiko would now automatically be eliminated.

LAP: 32 OF 40

Into the pits. Frantic activity everywhere.

And Sally did well,
very
well, sending Jason out ahead of two racers who’d actually entered the pits
before
him - Raul Hassan, the No.2 driver for the Lockheed-Martin Team, and Jason’s Lombardi team-mate, Pablo Riviera - the in-pit overtaking manoeuvre elevating Jason to 12th.

He felt a little relieved - with Ideki already out, so long as he didn’t come 13th, 14th or 15th, he’d be returning for Race 2.

But as the race entered its final stages, things were about to get nasty.

LAP: 35 OF 40

Raul Hassan in his Lockheed tried to overtake Jason at the Elbow.

After Jason’s in-pit overtaking on Lap 32, Hassan had hounded him for the next three laps, snapping at Jason’s heels - so that when they hit the Elbow on Lap 35, they hit it almost together.

The two cars banked sharply, side-by-side, Jason on the inside, Hassan on the outside.

Jason felt the immense G-forces of the turn assaulting his body. He gripped his steering wheel for dear life, as if it were the only thing holding him inside the
Argonaut
.

The G-force meter on his dashboard ticked upwards:

And then - just as Hassan had planned - it happened.

For the briefest of instants, as his car hit 8-Gs, Jason blacked out.

A squeal from the Bug roused him - and he decelerated, wrestling with his steering wheel, and caught the
Argonaut
just before it hit the Dead Zone - but not before Hassan, Riviera and a third driver, Carlo Martinez in a Boeing-Ford, all snuck past Jason.

It was a costly mistake.

Suddenly the
Argonaut
was in 15th place.

Suddenly Jason was coming last.

LAP: 36 OF 40

The last four laps of the race went by in a blur.

Jason raced as though his life depended on it, zigging and zagging through the tight New York streets. Yet his error at the Elbow had hurt him - on every lap, he took it ever more gingerly…and he gradually fell further behind the others.

But he kept on driving anyway, keeping them in sight, staying close.

Something could happen. Anything could happen.

So long as you were there at the end, you always had a chance.

This was Henry Chaser’s ‘Bradbury Principle’, in reference to that time at the Winter Olympics when the Australian short-track speed-skater, Steven Bradbury, had dropped back behind the leaders, only to see them
all
fall - taking each other out in a spectacular crash - on the final turn of the race.

As all the lead skaters lay splayed everywhere on the ice, Bradbury had simply skated past them and won the gold, incidentally the first gold medal Australia had ever won at a Winter Olympic Games.

The Bradbury Principle: stay alive and you never knew. And in Masters racing, it had particular relevance: year after year, the final laps of each race saw some of the most downright dangerous driving ever, as racers sought to avoid elimination at any cost. This reckless driving was so common, it had a name: Masters Madness.

LAP: 40 OF 40

Into the last lap, and Jason was lagging behind the next five racers by about six car-lengths.

Raul Hassan had moved up through the field, as had Pablo Riviera, both now well clear of the bottom three.
Immediately in front of Jason were:

In 12th (and thus safe from elimination): Helmut Reitze, the German driver from the Porsche Team.

In 13th: Carlo Martinez, in his Boeing-Ford.

In 14th: Brock Peters, from the General Motors Team.

And then Jason.

Whipping through the financial district, but he couldn’t haul them in.

Down to the Elbow, and still no decent gain.

And then it was back up through the city, bending and banking furiously, before he crossed Central Park for the last time and came to the final few corners of the course.

Jason kicked himself for his earlier mistake, but strangely, he was happy.

He’d made it to the Masters.

And that in itself was an extraordinary achievement. He’d be back in future years, he was sure, but he’d be older then, wiser, a better racer. He was, after all, only 15.

And then, as the racers in front of him hit the final lefthand turn of the race he saw - spectacularly, gloriously - the Bradbury Principle in action.

It was largely the fault of the 13th-placed racer, Carlo Martinez, as he tried to avoid elimination by overtaking the 12th-placed driver, Helmut Reitze, in his Porsche.

By any reckoning, there was no room to move, but Martinez tried anyway - Masters Madness - thrusting his Boeing inside Reitze’s silver Porsche on the final turn.

The result was as tragic as it was spectacular.

Martinez collected Reitze - and the two cars rolled together, but not before the car immediately behind them, the GM of Brock Peters, slammed fully into the back of them. Peters and his navigator ejected an instant before their car disappeared in a billowing explosion of flames.

All three cars crashed to the roadway, their charred remains littering the final turn on both the left and right.

At which point, the
Argonaut -
left for dead in last place
-
just cruised by them, banking round into Fifth Avenue, slicing past the dark columns of smoke rising from the assembled wreckage, before it zoomed across the Finish Line, the last car to cross the Line in Race 1, but safely in 12th place.

By sheer good fortune, by just hanging in there when all seemed lost, Jason was through to Race 2!

NEW YORK CITY, USA (THURSDAY) AFTER LIBERTY SUPERSPRINT

As soon as the Liberty Supersprint was over, gigantic scoreboards sprang to life across New York City: above the Start-Finish Line on Fifth Avenue, in Times Square, on the Brooklyn Bridge and in hundreds of other locations.

The leaderboard looked like this:

LIBERTY MANHATTAN THE THE TOTAL

DRIVER CAR SUPERSPRINT GATE RACE PURSUIT QUEST
POINTS