#traderjoesss

alex albon, "revelation"

It hits Alex somewhere between another two Q1 exits, having to smile for media afterwards and keep on regurgitating the same party line: the car's not where we want it to be, but the team will give everything to get it there. Believe it or not he used to have faith in that spiel, in James' great Williams project, the rebirth of one of Formula 1's most historic racing teams after years of mediocrity. It helped that James believed in it too, and George, and every face he knew in the garage and every one he didn't; last year proved they were getting somewhere, finally, and P5 was just the start of that promised dream.

Now Alex sits in a car more than a second off the pace; attends panicked engineering debriefs he wishes he could tune out with his headphones; lies beside Lily in bed and tries not to shake apart at the realisation, the final revelation, that the car won't get better, at least not in the years Alex has left in F1; that he'll never step onto the podium in a white racing suit let alone chase the even more distant dream of a championship. It hits Alex, and hollows out something inside his chest that he'd been keeping safe and warm for the possibility, for the kind of career George and Lando look set on having, multiple WDCs between them—and it isn't fair to that boy who karted like it was in his blood, for whom racing felt more like breathing, who Lando had a poster of up on his wall—but if Alex has learned anything over the last 30 years it's that nothing in life is ever really fair, and that's not a revelation at all; it's just the way it is.

your thoughts??

(i have more to say than that but i'll say it in your comments)