The applause for Xavier and his team died down, and the announcer"s voice came again over the loudspeakers:
"And in second place, Car No.55, Team Argonaut. Driver: Jason Chaser; Navigator: Bug Chaser; Mech Chief: Sally McDuff."
Head down with disappointment, Jason stepped up onto the podium.
What happened next made him freeze in shock.
The crowd went nuts.
Absolutely, totally ballistic.
The colossal roar that they gave him and Sally and the Bug almost brought down the entire stadium.
Flashbulbs popped, horns blared, people raised their hands above their heads to clap. Even Xavier was taken aback by the strength of their cheering.
But it was true.
The crowd was giving a bigger cheer to the racer who"d come second than they had for the racer who"d come first!
Jason was stunned, and at first he didn"t understand why this was happening.
Nevertheless, with the Bug and Sally beside him, he took his place on the second tier of the podium and, dressed in his cool new racesuit, waved hesitantly to the crowd.
The crowd went even crazier at the gesture, started chanting: "Jason! JASON! JASON!"
It was then that Jason saw his mother down in the crowd. She was crying with joy. Beside her, his father, Henry, was busily taking audio-included digital photographs for their family alb.u.m.
And in that instant Jason began to understand.
Xavier had won the tournament, and won it well, and the crowd respected that.
While for his part Jason had lost - but he had lost well.
After a staggering 390 laps of racing, at the edge of total exhaustion, he had lost by less than a second to a guy who had creamed every other opponent he had faced - and the crowd respected that even more.
Jason remembered something his father had once told him: It"s not how we win that defines us, Jason, it"s how we lose. Winners come and go, but the racer who goes down fighting will live forever in people"s hearts.
Jason smiled at that as he gazed out over the roaring crowd - the crowd roaring for him.
As he did so, Race Director Calder handed each member of Xavier"s winning team an enormous bottle of champagne, and Xavier shook his bottle hard and popped the cork, sending a geyser of champagne shooting into the air above the winner"s podium.
That evening, the Chaser family - plus Sally and Scott Syracuse - returned to Chooka"s Charcoal Chicken Restaurant for another celebratory dinner.
"Guess what," Sally said as she munched on a burger. "I heard that after the winner"s presentation the head of the Lockheed-Martin pro team, Antony Nelson, approached Xavier and asked him if he wanted to apprentice with them at the Italian Run next month."
"No way!" Jason exclaimed. "The Lockheed Factory Team. Wow! To the winner, the spoils, I guess..."
"Don"t you worry," Henry Chaser said, seeing his disappointment. "Your time"ll come. I don"t think your efforts today went unnoticed."
"Yeah?" Jason laughed. "Well, I don"t see the chiefs of any pro teams walking up to us and offering us a run in a Grand Slam race."
Just as Jason was saying this, a large figure entered the restaurant.
Heads turned, whispers arose - precisely because you don"t often see billionaires in takeaway chicken joints.
It was Umberto Lombardi.
"Ah-ha!" the big Italian boomed. "Now this is my kind of dinner! Three Super Burgers to go, please, madam, with extra cheese! Oh, would anyone else like anything?"
Lombardi sat down beside Martha Chaser. "My sincere apologies, Senora Chaser, for intruding upon your celebrations. But I beg your indulgence, I will not stay for long. I do, however, have a serious question for this wonderful young team."
Everyone at the table fell silent.
Lombardi leaned forward, lowered his voice. "I thought you all raced well today. Very well. No other team out there came close to surviving almost 400 laps of matchracing. But you did. More than that. You did that and you almost won!
"Now. As you are probably aware, the Italian Run is to be held in three weeks" time. Up until now, my team has only ever run one car in pro events, but lately I"ve been thinking of expanding the team...and adding a second car."
Jason felt a tingle race up his spine. "Yes..."
Lombardi went on. "What I was wondering was this: would the members of Team Argonaut like to race the second Lombardi Racing Team car in this year"s Italian Run?"
Jason dropped his fork. The Bug blanched. Sally"s mouth fell open. Henry Chaser stopped chewing. Martha Chaser"s lip started to quiver. Scott Syracuse just kept eating casually.
"You..." Jason stammered. "You want us to race for you in the next Grand Slam race?"
"Yes. I do," Lombardi said simply.
Jason swallowed.
This was too much. The enormity of what Lombardi was suggesting rocked through him with the force of an earthquake.
This wouldn"t be like any old School race. Or even like the Sponsors" Tournament for that matter. This would be bigger - much bigger. This would be a professional race against professional racers, in Italy, beamed live to the entire world.
"Well?" Lombardi asked. "Do you race?"
Jason looked at the Bug, who nodded once.
He turned to Sally who, still silent with shock, nodded vigorously.
Then he turned back to Lombardi and said, "You bet we race."
And so it was settled.
Team Argonaut was going to Italy.
PART V: THE ITALIAN RUN.
CHAPTER ONE.
In the hover car racing world, there are four "Grand Slam" races. In order, they are: The Sydney Cla.s.sic, held in February.
The London Underground Run, May.
The Italian Run, August.
And the New York Masters, in October.
Naturally, they are all very different kinds of races.
The Sydney race is a typically Australian event - tough and hard and long, a test of endurance, like five-day-long cricket matches or the old Bathurst 1000 car race. It is a lap race that lasts 20 hours, during which racers do 156 laps of a course that runs past the eight giant ocean-dams that line Australia"s eastern coastline, ending underneath the grandest Finish Line in the world: the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Australians call it "the race that stops a nation".
The London Underground Run is a gate race - the most fiendish gate race of all. Held in the subterranean dark of the London subway system, it tests every racer"s tactical abilities, seeing how many underground stations they can whip through in 6 hours. No racer has ever "clocked up" every single station.
For its part, the New York Masters is a carnival of racing, four races held over four consecutive days, one race per day - one supersprint, a gate race, one collective pursuit, and finishing it off, an example of the rarest race of all, a long-distance search-and-retrieve "quest" race that takes racers from New York City to Niagara Falls and back again.
The Italian Run, however, has its own unique format.
Held every year in the baking heat of the northern summer, it is a unidirectional race. Racers do not do laps of a circuit. Rather, they start in one city and end in another, on the other side of the country.
The race starts in Rome, inside the Colosseum, after which it shoots north, up the spine of Italy, swinging through Florence, Padua and Milan before it winds up through the Alps and then begins the long trip south down the western coast and between the islands of Sicily and Sardinia. Then it"s under the bottom of the boot - where racers can choose to cut the heel if they dare - followed by the final dash up the eastern side of the country to the grand finish in Venice II.
Interestingly, there are two pit areas in the Italian Run - one at Leonardo Da Vinci International Airport in Fiumicino near Rome and a second directly across the country at Pescara. It is thus the only race in the world where pit crews have to travel overland to get to the second stop. It is not unknown for a racer to get to Pescara and find that his Mech Chief has not yet arrived.
Unlike most of the races Jason had run at Race School (which operated under the southern hemisphere rules of racing, such as "car-over-the-line" finishes), the Italian Run operated under the more traditional rules of the northern pro-racing confederations, including a different finishing rule: "driver-over-the-line".
This meant that it was the first racer - driver or navigator, it didn"t matter - over the line who won the race, whether or not they were in their car. On more than one occasion, a racer, his car broken down or crashed, had run (or in Italy, where the Finish Line was over water, swum) over the Line to finish the race.
Ultimately, however, the Italian Run was a truly European event, and as such it was loved by all of Europe. Every year, millions descended upon Italy for it. Immense crowds line the coastline of the entire country, sitting on hills and cliffs and hover grandstands.
For one week in August every year, Italy becomes the centre of Europe, buzzing with tourists and race fans - all of them with money to spend. Economists say that the week of the Italian Run injects $60 billion into the Italian economy.
It was into this surging pulsating world that Jason Chaser was about to plunge.
CHAPTER TWO.