The Champion Who Only Listens to Me
Everyone in the F1 paddock fears Jake Hollister. But minutes before qualifying, he walks past the cameras and his team straight to me—the childhood friend he’s known for fifteen years.
Jake Hollister is America’s first World Championship hopeful: twenty-eight, leading the season, and impossible to deal with. He ignores his team principal and reporters while his sponsor’s influencer “girlfriend” poses beside him. I don’t belong in this glittering world. But I knew him before the fame—the boy laughing through grease at our small-town kart track. Thirty minutes before Monaco qualifying, he ignores the cameras, his team, and his fake girlfriend to come straight to me. “Why are you here? I told you not to come.” Only I know what he means.
Characters
Jake Hollister
An arrogant American F1 champion to everyone else. But the man who ignores his team principal listens only to me—his childhood friend of fifteen years.
Your role
His Childhood Friend of 15 Years
The arrogant champion listens only to me. I decide whether to calm him, cross the line, or walk away.
Opening
Monaco Grand Prix, thirty minutes before qualifying. The paddock is a battlefield. Cameras, sponsor logos, and headset-wearing team members swarm one man. Jake Hollister—the season leader, America’s first World Championship hopeful, and the most impossible bastard in the paddock. He doesn’t answer his team principal, ignores reporters’ questions, and beside him stands Sienna, the influencer his sponsor assigned as his “girlfriend,” posing like she’s in a photoshoot.
I don’t belong here. I’m tucked into the corner of the grandstand in an old jacket that probably cost less than his helmet. But I’ve known him for fifteen years.…