F1: The Making of a Racing God

Chapter 24 Junior High 2

Thirteen or fourteen years old is a very delicate age.

We believe we've shed our childishness and desperately want to mature and become the person we aspire to be.

At the same time, we love to fantasize; our ideal selves always seem to be full of endless possibilities—today it's Kamehameha, tomorrow Avada Kedavra, and the day after tomorrow Getsuga Tenshou.

This often traps us in a self-perceived aloofness, a feeling that's hard for outsiders to understand. Sometimes, we wonder which character we're trying to portray with that strange, contrived aura.

The formal school uniform looks a bit like a Zhongshan suit; every Monday when I wear it, I feel like Ip Man.

Unfortunately, I don't know how to practice Wing Chun; I only occasionally practice a few Tai Chi stances with my grandfather.

Who is my ideal role model at other times? Takumi Fujiwara?

Honestly, at the same age, I feel like I might be even better than him. But my dad keeps telling me not to follow his example, and to be careful not to bring a Mogi Natsuki home.

[I want to say he's far too optimistic. He actually expects me to find someone like Uehara Mika to grow old with? Your son can't even hook up with Natsuki!]

The only similarity between me and Takumi Fujiwara is that he's known as the "Akina Mountain Speed ​​King," while I—

"Racing God, aren't you going to finish your homework before going home?"

"Yeah, there's no time to go back."

Thanks to Zhang Jinhua, Shu Long has been called by this nickname since the first year of junior high school. Even when teachers call his name in class, they call Shu Long the "God of Cars".

Habit is a terrible thing, and Shulong has long since given up the struggle.

"We'll be going now. How about we go to your racetrack tomorrow weekend?"

"Whatever, I'll always be here. And let me make this clear beforehand, I'll only treat you to two sessions at most, the rest you'll have to pay for your own trips."

The boy who greeted Shu Long at the beginning was named She Haitao. He jokingly called Shu Long a "stingy guy," punched him on the shoulder, and ran off laughing.

His girlfriend had been waiting at the classroom door for a while.

Yes, you heard right, second year of junior high, girlfriend.

The two lived in the same neighborhood, and their families arranged for one family to drop them off together in the morning and the other family to pick them up together in the evening—a classic childhood sweetheart relationship.

This person is quite familiar to everyone; she is Chen Tingya, the classmate who gave way to Shulong's car in Haigeng.

Those who can be group leaders and responsible for collecting homework naturally have good grades, so it's not surprising that Chen Tingya got into this school, especially since she's in the class next to Shulong's.

She used to be a tiny, underdeveloped girl, but now she's grown into a beautiful young woman. Her personality is also much more outgoing than before. She's peeking into the classroom and quietly greeting Shu Long.

This hasn't changed much from before; it still has that same elusive charm.

"Car God, Car God, it's the holidays~ I don't have that much pocket money."

"Get lost! You two are like blind men, all sticky and blind, shining in the sun!"

"What do you mean? I don't understand. Do you agree?"

"If you don't understand, go look it up in a book yourself. Why are you asking me this? If my dad were here, he probably wouldn't want a single penny from you."

Chen Tingya chuckled and made a face, then turned around and caught up with She Haitao. The two walked shoulder to shoulder towards the school gate.

Shu Long glanced at the math homework spread out in front of him, with only a little bit left, and suddenly felt completely devoid of the desire to continue writing. Studying was so boring.

The classmate next to him peeked over with a sly look, and when he saw that Shu Long's homework was still missing a little something, his face immediately changed, and he shamelessly became the supervisor.

It's interfering with his ability to copy homework!

Yes, it was him, not her.

There are a total of 62 students in the class, 32 boys and 30 girls.

Everyone else gets to enjoy their wonderful youth and their deskmate, but there are two unlucky guys who can only enjoy each other's deskmates.

The key point is that the first semester of the second year of junior high school is almost over, and the seating arrangement in the class has been changed no less than ten times. However, the homeroom teacher seems to be deliberately messing with them, intentionally omitting these two junior high school students every time.

One of them was always taking leave, supposedly to go abroad to participate in some kind of racing competition, while the other was always laughing and joking around. What they had in common was that their grades were among the best in the class. In the eyes of all the teachers, they were probably two oddballs.

Don't be afraid of influencing each other, but don't influence others.

If Shu Long considers himself an absolute genius in racing, then Teng Weifeng is most likely a genius in studying or taking exams.

I never listened in class; he was either constantly chatting with Shu Long about this and that, or hiding in his desk reading novels on his phone.

I've never seen him do his homework. Every day after school, this guy insists on staying next to Shulong, not because he's studious, but simply to catch Shulong with his freshly completed homework. Luckily, he can have enough time to play League of Legends after he gets home.

In his words, "Does this kind of knowledge even need to be learned? Isn't it something you can automatically learn by copying it from your homework?"

Sometimes Shu Long even wondered if this guy also had some kind of "god-like academic system" called "playing dumb to become a god", otherwise why would God be so unfair?

Besides being smart, this guy was also a pervert, earning him the nickname "Train King".

At first, Shu Long didn't understand what the nickname meant until someone explained it to him: "What does a train engine make when it starts moving?"

"What's the noise?"

"Woo——"

Because he frequented online forums for many years, Teng Weifeng was very familiar with many adult jokes for 18+. It can be said that this bastard deserves at least half the credit for Shulong's rapid enlightenment, even though he rarely has time to play on his phone now.

Of course, being cheap and shameless is also a major characteristic that this guy has to experience.

"Hey racing god, what does it feel like to watch your girlfriend run off with someone else? Do you think people who are really good at racing all have a bit of a cuckold's trait in them?"

"Get lost! If you don't want to copy, give me back my homework! You can't expect anything good to come out of a dog's mouth. Whose girlfriend ran off with someone else?"

Teng Weifeng didn't say anything, but just looked at Shu Long with a face full of sympathy, shaking his head and making strange "tsk tsk tsk" noises.

"I?"

"uh-huh."

"Chen Tingya?" "Who else could it be?"

"Who told you that Chen Tingya is my girlfriend?"

"Zhang Jinhua, you probably don't know because you took leave to run a race abroad that day. Last Friday in PE class, we were discussing which girl from the surrounding classes was the prettiest. When we got to Chen Tingya, she opened her mouth wide and spilled all your old secrets. Now everyone knows."

Damn it, there's no need to ask. Shu Long knew who did it the moment Teng Weifeng opened his mouth!
Didn't that bastard get forced by his mother to attend a ton of tutoring classes? And even that couldn't shut up his foul mouth?

And there are actually two people with such mouths in the class, what makes them so special?
"Hey buddy, stop hiding it! You can't hide this kind of thing. Didn't you see how those girls look at you differently? You used to pretend to be so innocent with me, but I didn't expect you to be so quick to realize things."

"No, you actually believe what that hanged man said? According to Zhang Jinhua, I had seven or eight girlfriends when I was in elementary school. Do you believe that?"

This isn't a matter of belief or not. Teng Weifeng covered his mouth with a look of utter surprise: "You only told me about something this important now? Am I still your good deskmate?"

Shu Long rolled up the English newspaper on the table in an annoyed manner and smacked Teng Weifeng on the head with a "bang." Only then did the sleazy-looking guy put on a strange expression as if he was ready to listen obediently.

"Sigh, actually I think you could try again. What if things go well? I won't say anything!"

Seeing that Shu Long was about to snatch his homework back, Teng Weifeng immediately made a gesture of zipping up his mouth.

Shu Long's voice was a little hoarse as he went through puberty, marking the beginning of his rapid development.

It was a truly magical process. The night before, when I said goodnight to my parents and grandfather, I still had the standard baby voice of a little child. The next morning, when I opened my mouth, I almost fainted from fright.

Just like his height of 172 cm in just over a year, the budding feelings for the opposite sex during puberty were also beginning to emerge.

I used to watch Naruto and only watched Naruto, but later I realized that I might want to watch Sasuke. I wondered why there weren't so many girls around me cheering for me.

Although he got a buzz cut because of school regulations, Shu Long thought that the guy in the mirror was more angular than before, but still handsome. He was only growing taller and didn't get pimples, so he was pretty good-looking. Why didn't he get the same treatment as the protagonist?
Although Takumi is a bit slow-witted, he still made it onto the list of "most popular boys" at school.

Is it because he can't grow long hair like a traditional, gentle male protagonist?
School rules really did me wrong!

Over the past year, the types of anime that Shulong watched have gradually shifted from the standard Bleach, Naruto, and One Piece anime to some harem anime, but after watching them for a while, he felt they were getting boring and discovered that pure love sweet anime seemed pretty good too.

After much back and forth, Shu Long realized that he still seemed to love watching Naruto. If he had a "Hinata" by his side who could always silently stay by his side, that would probably be the most romantic thing in the world.

Thinking back carefully, it seems that I have had girls like "Hinata" around me before, such as Chen Tingya.

However, due to a young boy's inexplicable pride and competitiveness, Shu Long chose to escape.

Have you ever had a crush on anyone?
There may have been some attraction, but not enough to warrant the courage to risk everything.

If one day it really comes to the point where I need to confess my feelings to someone, Shu Long feels that he may only have that realization once in his entire life.

Sorry?
Although he didn't want to admit it, Teng Weifeng's bluntness did hurt him a little.

I could pretend not to care before, probably just because no one pointed it out.

That's normal, though. When the heart is exposed outside the chest cavity, most people's first reaction is probably just to protect it.

"Hey, deskmate, since you've already treated them, why don't you bring me one tomorrow too?"

"What's wrong? Aren't you going to play your League of Legends anymore? Didn't you say you were busy helping girls rank up?"

"Ugh~ Don't even mention it. My skill level is only Diamond at best, and I couldn't carry anyone, so I got kicked out. Turns out it was a guy using a voice changer! How about I take this bachelor along to help you get rid of the dog food smell on the field?"

Shu Long initially wanted to suggest bringing someone else, but then he thought about how Yu Mujie, that bastard, had been getting along really well with Shen Qian lately, and if he brought him along too, he'd become the only old straw on the field.
Holding his nose, Shu Long agreed to Teng Weifeng's offer, and then gritted his teeth and promised that he would not ask for a single penny from him tomorrow. Only then did Shu Long hastily tidy up his desk, sling his bag over his shoulder, and go to the small square in front of the school gate, where he found the mountain bike locked next to a big tree.

The days of being picked up and dropped off by car are long gone. The high-intensity driving is very physically demanding, and now riding a bike to and from school every day is one of Shulong's daily exercise routines.

The school is about ten kilometers away from home, so it's a round trip of twenty kilometers. The time saved from a jogging event can be made up for on the track.

Shulong rode very fast; the ten-kilometer journey, including traffic lights, took less than half an hour to get home. The aerobic exercise washed away a lot of the waste generated from doing homework, and a question slowly emerged in his mind.

The classmates in the class usually get along very well. They can have a good relationship, but they won't fawn over anyone for any reason.

It's like everyone knows that Shu Long's family owns a racetrack thanks to Zhang Jinhua's big mouth, but no one would shamelessly try to piggyback on it like Teng Weifeng did. From the first year of junior high until now, they've only occasionally gotten together with a few other people to go race together once in a while.

Although Shu Long was somewhat surprised, he didn't think about it too much, assuming that the other person simply wanted to find a more respectable excuse for a date with their parents.

According to Teng Weifeng, wouldn't that mean that She Haitao himself knew about the rumors about this so-called "girlfriend"?

This seems a bit intriguing; perhaps we should explain?
The next morning, after lifting weights in the gym upstairs for a while, Shu Long was dragged by Grandpa Shu to the park to practice Tai Chi for a while. It wasn't until 10 o'clock that Shu Long finally rode his bike to Haigeng.

Because he heard that his son's classmate was going to the racetrack to play today, Shu Xiong went to check the car's condition early in the morning, but Shu Long himself had mixed feelings and was reluctant to go.

Zhou Guanyu recently shared some good news with him: throughout the 2013 season with the Strawberry Racing team, he won both the Rotax Max British Championship and the European Challenge Championship.

And what am I doing?

He was nicknamed "Haigeng Car God" by his classmates, and then he raced against his classmates out of jealousy.
They both entered the racing world in almost the same year, yet their progress has unknowingly diverged so much simply because of an 11-month age difference.

European competitions have stricter age restrictions, at least for Shu Long, who is a complete "outsider." The Junior category requires participants to be at least thirteen years old, and Shu Long only met the age requirement in the middle of this year.

As for the lower categories, Shu Long ran a few regional races in Italy sporadically in 12 and throughout 13, and undoubtedly won them all by a crushing margin.

Their skill level is indeed higher than that of domestic teams, but only by a limited margin. In addition, there is a lot of randomness in the wins and losses of younger age groups, so it is actually difficult for them to catch the eye of higher-level experts.

If that's all there is to it, then spending so much money to participate in these competitions is pointless.

These trips abroad are less about training and more about getting familiar with the pace of international competitions and, incidentally, trying to extract some advantages from George.

There's no way around it; you only realize how powerful people can be once you go out into the world. It's not about driving skills; it's just that with Shulong's family background, compared to those super-rich people, they can only be considered moderately well-off at best. They simply can't afford the extravagance.

Next year's 14 season, which will be a real test of strength, may be the only year that Shulong has the opportunity to prove itself on someone else's turf.

If you can prove it, it means there's still a chance to prove it again. But if you can't escape it, you'll just have to face reality and be swept away by the tide.

　Thank you to the following readers for their votes: 魔龙VS幻天, 补语, AniccaQAQ, 月山人, 我的老婆是暗暗荔枝, 语留, 墨染瑾年子夜, 唐江野, 书友20180310162255644, and 抄录者mars.

　　It looks like Sauber's season might just be so-so. Good luck to them.

　　The new combination of older and younger brothers in prison, it's hard to say whether Boto Leto is lucky or unlucky.

　　
　
(End of this chapter)