Part 31 (1/2)

And with that, she'd spun on her heel with the grace of a ballerina - leaving Barnaby speechless - spotted Jason, and waltzed over.

By the time she sat down, Jason was grinning from ear to ear.

RACE 43.

Two days later, Jason was back in the driver's seat for Race 43. If he was going to finish the year in the Top 4, he needed to finish in the points today.

He ended up finis.h.i.+ng 7th, garnering four points, having spent the greater part of the race staying well clear of all the other cars. It was a timid drive - and both the Bug and Sally noticed it.

That said, there was one hairy moment very early in the race: in the hurly-burly of the start, with all the cars jostling for position, Jason could have sworn that Joaquin Cortez had tried to ram his tailfin.

Jason had swerved wide, clipping some demag lights for his trouble, and the two cars had missed each other by centimetres.

Just racing? Jason thought. Or was it something more? Or was he just getting paranoid?

Either way, he thought, he had to do something about this confidence thing.

The next race was on Tuesday. So he had three whole days to work out a solution.

He started on Sunday morning...at 5:30 a.m.

Before first light, he got up and, leaving the Bug fast asleep in his bunk, went down to Pit Lane and in the silence, pushed the Argonaut out of its garage.

He clamped some new mags on her, and attached a little hover-trailer to her rear hook. Then he jumped in, and blasted out of the pits, heading inland, up toward the forested northern end of the island.

And there he ran loops around a course of his own design, a tight winding track around the upper forests and islands of Tasmania.

At first he did his laps alone, just timing himself with the Argonaut's digital stopwatch.

Later, he pulled eight mechanical objects from his hover-trailer - hover drones.

Bullet-shaped, superfast and extremely nimble, hover drones were training tools usually used to train very young hover car drivers, giving them a taste of other racers flying all around them, but without risking anyone's safety, since they were equipped with proximity sensors - meaning they couldn't actually collide with a car. For a racer at the Race School to be using them was like an Olympic swimmer using floaties to swim. They were only at the School for Open Days when young kids came to race around the School's tracks and get tips from the teachers.

Jason, however, reprogrammed his drones to race the course with him in a hyper-aggressive manner, darting and swooping all around the Argonaut as it raced - giving him the sensation of closely-moving rival cars, retraining himself. That said, he still kept their anti-collision proximity sensors switched on.

At first, the drones whipped across his bow as they raced, cutting dangerously close - then they started zinging across his tailfin, missing it by millimetres.

And Jason drove...and drove...and drove.

Indeed, he was concentrating so intently that he never noticed the pair of people watching him through digital binoculars from a nearby hilltop.

Monday morning.

And he went up north again, and raced alone in the dewy green forests of Tasmania.

This time he disengaged the drones' anti-collision sensors, and at one point in his racing, one of the drones bounced hard against his tailfin, denting it, creating a loud bang, shocking Jason.

He immediately pulled to a halt.

He was hyperventilating.

'Don't do that!' he yelled aloud to himself. 'Start your car again, and get back up there.'

He keyed his power switch and flew back out onto his track. Immediately, the drones were swarming around

him like a pack of killer bees.

Bang! He was. .h.i.t on the side.

He clenched his teeth, kept driving.

Bang! Again. Other side.

Kept racing.

Bang! This time it was in the tailfin, and the Argonaut lurched violently to the side, losing control...

...but Jason righted her...

...and regained control.

In his helmet, he breathed again.

And he smiled.

The two people watching him from the hilltop did not. He was back at his apartment before eight. The Bug was

still snoring.

Tuesday morning. Race Day for Race 44.