Chicane

She walked into his office on Day One to quit. The first sentence she said to him was I quit. He answered: Give me one season. She gave him the season. By Chapter 14 they were kissing in a service corridor at COTA after she watched her driver almost die. By Chapter 22 she was on an engineering bench in the Silverstone garage at one in the morning. The hate did not go anywhere. It just made room.

He read her MSc thesis on ground-effect turbulence in 2022. He wrote she is the smartest person I have ever read on the back page in pencil and dated it 11 September 2022. He spent the next eighteen months building her a Formula One team to come and run — he hired her chief mechanic, her sim engineer, her wind tunnel in Köln — before he ever picked up the phone to call her agent. The folder lives in his desk in Towcester. She finds it in Chapter 23.

Declan Pryce, the lead driver of a rival team, corners Sloane in a paddock corridor in Monaco. He puts his hand on the wall beside her head. He does not finish the sentence. Ronan rounds the corner. He does not raise his voice — he never raises his voice — and he breaks Pryce’s right hand cleanly with the angle of a man who has done this once before. The line he says afterwards, quietly, the way a priest speaks at a confession, is the line BookTok will quote-card across Instagram for a year.

He owns the team. She runs the engineering. The first rule of his company, written into every employment contract, is personal lives stay outside the paddock. The first time his hand finds the small of her back, it is in a corridor in front of a man who is about to lose his right hand. The corridor has security cameras. His sister kills the footage. The British tabloids try to print the story anyway. His sister kills that, too.

He learned how she takes her coffee — black, four shots, room temperature — by watching her order it once at a Mercedes briefing in Brackley in 2023. Two years later he writes the order on a paper sleeve in his own hand and leaves it on her bedside table at the Hôtel Hermitage at five a.m. He has the same watch she wears, the same year, the same model, on his right wrist. She does not notice for nine months.

The book travels with the season. Miami in May (the meet-cute), Austin in October (the kiss), Monaco in May qualifying (the balcony, the corridor, the first night), Silverstone in July (the second night, on the bench), Vegas in November (the worship scene, on the forty-seventh floor of the Wynn), Mexico City (the love declaration on a balcony), Abu Dhabi triple-header (the championship, the grovel, the win). Each city has its own texture. The constructors’ championship is decided on the last Sunday.

Her father was Michael Kincaid — Formula One driver, dead at Spa-Francorchamps in August 2016. Sloane was nineteen. She has not taken his Rolex Submariner off her right wrist since. Ronan was the man leading the lap when Michael’s car went into the wall. The truth about that lap is the secret that detonates the book in a Charleston kitchen in Chapter 33. The voicemail her mother plays her is forty-one seconds long. The first scene Maeve wrote was that voicemail. The whole book was built around it.

Wren, Sloane’s journalist sister, has been sleeping on the wrong side of an eight-year fight when the book opens. Mama Kincaid still keeps her husband’s voicemail on her iPhone. Theo Vance is twenty-five, Californian, the team’s lead driver, and the man who tells Ronan in Chapter 29: if you break my engineer, I will drive myself into a wall at Turn One and blame you. Owen the Welshman knows Sloane drinks four shots room-temperature. Nora, Ronan’s sister, kills British tabloid stories with the calm of a woman who has been doing it for nine years.

Chicane finishes. The two people on the last page are still together — on the last page and in the last chapter and at two a.m. in a motorhome in Abu Dhabi where she takes off her father’s watch for the first time in nine years and sets it on the nightstand beside his. The trilogy continues with Apex (Wren and Theo) out now, then Pole Position in fall 2026 — all three books in the same calendar year. You can stop here. Most readers won’t.