Lane Moretti & Mateo Reyes
The youngest team principal on the grid. Italian-American, raised in a karting family in Modena, schooled in strategy in Maranello. The first woman to lead a championship-contending F1 team. The girl Mateo Reyes met when she was nineteen and never quite got over.
Mexican. Three-time race winner. Leading the championship by nine points heading into Abu Dhabi. The kind of driver who never gives up a position cleanly. The boy who folded a karting pass into his wallet in Modena in 2014 and has carried it to every race since.
Eleven years ago they were nineteen and twenty-two at a karting academy in Modena. They had two months. They had a karting pass with her name in faded blue ballpoint on the back. They had everything.
Then her father died, the team that promised her a junior seat went bankrupt, and she walked away from racing entirely. He was twenty-two and on his way to F2. He did not chase her. He has regretted that for eleven years.
Now she is the Team Principal of Sartori Motorsport — the rival outfit Kestrel Racing has been chasing for two seasons. He is leading the championship by nine points. There are three races left. She walks into the Imola paddock on a Friday morning in a charcoal Sartori polo, and he sees her for the first time in eleven years.
And the championship he has been driving toward his entire career suddenly feels like the second-most-important thing happening that weekend.
Prologue · Mateo · Modena, August 2014
She gives me the pass on a Tuesday afternoon, in the shade behind the karting workshop, with her hair full of August dust and her hand shaking just enough to notice.
She does not look at me when she gives it to me. She looks at the pass. She has folded it once, neatly, so the photo is on the inside.
“Don’t open it now,” she says.
“When,” I say.
“When you race in F1,” she says. “Or whenever you need it. Whichever comes first.”
I want to tell her she could come with me. I want to tell her we’re nineteen and twenty-two and she has more talent in her left hand than half the boys in this academy have in their entire bodies. I want to tell her I’ve been writing her name on the inside of my helmet for six weeks.
I do not say any of these things.
She kisses me, once, on the cheekbone. Not the mouth. The cheekbone. “Win,” she says. “Win for me. I’ll know when you do.”
She is on a flight back to Maranello the next morning. She is at her father’s funeral the morning after that. She does not come back to Modena. I do not chase her.
I open the pass that night, in the dorm, alone.
On the back, in faded blue ballpoint:
— for luck.
— L.
It is eleven years before I see her again.
— The full prologue and Chapter One are sent to waitlist subscribers when the cover reveals in Out Now.
A folded karting pass. A blue-ink note. A man at the top of the world who has carried both with him to every race for a decade. A woman who walked away once and has spent eleven years finding out who she is on the other side of him.
She runs the team that has been Kestrel’s only real threat for two seasons. He drives for Kestrel. She gives the call that makes his rival pit two laps before him. He gives the call that closes her car off into Turn 8 at Suzuka. The rivalry is real, sustained, and sometimes the worst kind of foreplay.
The book opens at Imola in May with him already leading the championship and her car already a threat. By Vegas the gap is six points. By Abu Dhabi it is one. The race that ends the trilogy is also the race that decides the title — and there is exactly one corner in which they can still both win.
A booking error. A 47th-floor suite at the Bellagio. A storm grounding her flight to Phoenix. The Vegas chapter is forty-three pages long and you will not stop reading until the lights come up over the Strip.
“ He has carried that pass to every race for eleven years. She has, somehow, carried him to every team meeting for the same eleven years.
“ You don’t get to come back, Mateo. You don’t get to come back and ask me to choose between this team and the girl I was at nineteen.
“ Then don’t choose. Stay where you are. I’ll come to you.
You will love the rival-driver tension and the championship-year stakes — with a second-chance arc cut clean by eleven years apart.
You will love the second-chance ache and the worship-pov heat — with a championship at stake instead of a homecoming.
You will love the rival-professional dynamic and the slow, literary-feeling burn — with a faster pulse and a higher body count of grand prix.
You will love the long-letter-of-longing register — here as a folded karting pass that has waited eleven years to be answered.
Maeve Cross writes contemporary motorsport romance with grown-up heat, brilliant heroines, and heroes who have been quietly in love for years before the heroine ever notices.
She lives in Charleston, South Carolina, with too many books, an unreasonable opinion about Eau Rouge, and a vintage Rolex Submariner she does not wear. Pole Position is the third and final book in her Kestrel Racing trilogy.
“Lane Moretti is the first character I wrote who scared me. She still does. The book is about earning the right to write her ending.”
Read the full profile →
Enemies to lovers. F1. The forty-one-second voicemail that detonates the only family Sloane has left.
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Fake dating. He has been quietly in love with her for two years. Eight months of staged photographs that neither of them survives intact.
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Second chance. Rival teams. Championship year. He has carried her photograph for eleven years. She is about to take a championship from him.
Fall 2026 ↑
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