When I woke from the darkness, the first thing I saw was the inside of a coffin.
--I was still young by vampire standards, turned at the end of the last century.
I had a wager with the racing legend Senna.
Unlike humans, vampires are bound tightly by the power of a promise, especially when the other party dies at Imola.
He was a kind man I met by chance. I never tasted a drop of his blood.
I knew he was a genius, a Formula One driver.
But when I woke up, thirty years had passed, and he was known as the racing legend.
I don't know why I woke up. The only explanation is that I violated the power of the promise.
But it was just a bet made in a bar. After all these years, I can barely remember exactly what it was.
In the early 2020s, Red Bull ended the Mercedes dynasty.
I stood amid the Christmas lights, and the one I summoned wasn't Santa, but Satan: me.
The ground-effect era was about to begin. I vaguely remembered that Senna's bet was...
Winning the WDC with Williams? At least it wasn't the WCC.
The team standings... oh, they weren't at the bottom yet.
I have superhuman reflexes, strength, money, control over human blood servants, and the ability to grant them power.
But this looks entirely altruistic. There's absolutely no way for me to win the WDC myself.
Even my driver's license is fake. My top priority is learning to drive a race car? Maybe poach a bunch of engineers, like Newey?
Should I buy Williams? Or take advantage of the chaos at a bar and turn Verstappen, who just won the WDC, into a blood servant, then get him to teach me how to race?
He got something out of it too: I can enhance human abilities.
I'm afraid of sunlight, but at least F1 has plenty of cover.
I tell people I'm allergic to UV rays and only show my face at night races, like Singapore or even Las Vegas.
Someone wished to win the WDC and WCC with Ferrari. I agreed, but said it would happen eventually, just not this year.
Someone else wanted to become Mercedes' number-one driver. That was easy to grant, since it was bound to happen sooner or later.
And that wasn't all...
This seems to be a story about a vampire dining in the paddock and winning the WDC.
In the end, all my blood servants thanked Senna together at his grave in Brazil.
I smiled slyly. Oh, who knows whether Senna became a vampire because of me?
[Reader's guide]
1. Only the blurb is written in first person. The main story is in third person.
2. No romantic pairing. Master-servant or close-friends dynamics; essentially an ensemble cast.
3. The ground-effect era covers events from 2022 to 2025. Some details may be inaccurate or fictionalized.
4. The protagonist is a gleeful nonhuman. Please go easy on the judgment.
[An idea that came to me by chance. I don't know when I'll start writing it, and I'll revise the blurb before publishing.]
Theme: A promise matters more than good food.
