Francorchamps

Francorchamps is a short story written by Ryan Nurse. Originally written c. 2010 for a school competition, it was later submitted as part of his GCSEs, then published to deviantART on 15 August 2013. Nurse heavily revised the story as part of Project 20:15 and posted the updated version on 30 August 2015, on the seventeenth anniversary of its events.

Written from the perspective of Formula 1 driver Jarno Trulli, Francorchamps depicts the aborted first start of the 1998 Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps, in which a first-lap pile-up in heavy rain eliminated 13 of the 22 competitors, forcing a restart. Francorchamps was the first of Nurse's works to have been based on real events, and is so far the only one to have featured a real person as its protagonist.

Plot summary
The story, told through a stream of consciousness, starts as Jarno Trulli counts down to the start of the 1998 Belgian Grand Prix, which is being held amidst torrential rainfall. As the lights go out, the twenty-two runners get away without any problems, and Trulli manages to overtake two cars by the time he exits the La Source hairpin. In the distance, his vision hampered by the water, Trulli just makes out a car swerving into the barriers; seconds later, unsighted by the spray, he himself collides with another car and is in turn hit from behind, forcing his retirement from the race.

Trulli is unhurt by the accident, but fears that the crash could hurt his chances of staying in Formula One, having failed to score any points so far that season. As he exits his car, he accidentally kicks a detached wheel, and slowly begins to realize the severity of the collision: looking around, he counts at least a dozen totalled cars, with debris scattered all over the race track. Trulli reasons that in the poor conditions, the drivers around him had all been as unsighted as he had, resulting in an unavoidable chain reaction. The red flags are shown, suspending the race, and a marshal remarks to Trulli that it would be "a miracle" if nobody was hurt (indeed, Eddie Irvine and Rubens Barrichello had suffered minor injuries, with the latter missing the restart). Trulli's team-mate Olivier Panis then speaks with him, telling him that he too had been eliminated in the crash and, since Trulli is the team's lead driver, he will receive the sole spare car, leaving Panis to sit on the sidelines. As Jarno puts his crash helmet back on, he observes how the crash has eliminated both race winners and backmarkers alike, and watches a dejected David Coulthard, whose spin had triggered the pile-up, heading back to the pit lane. When his race engineer contacts him to ask what happened, Trulli likens the scene to a bomb site before making his own way back to the pit garage.

Project 20:15 version
The Project 20:15 version changes several details of the story. In the updated version, his conversation with Panis s greatly extended; unlike the original, Panis keeps his helmet on. After talking with Panic, Trulli does not put his helmet back on, nor does he talk to his race engineer, and his likening of the crash scene to a bomb site is no longer vocalized.

Comparison to the actual race
The story's description of Trulli's crash is inaccurate: while he was indeed hit from behind by one of the Stewart cars (possibly Rubens Barrichello), he had not run into the back of anyone beforehand. Barrichello and Eddie Irvine both suffered minor injuries, something hinted at by a marshal who ominously tells Trulli that "it'll be a damned miracle if nobody was hurt". Barrichello did not take the restart; Irvine did but retired after a spin.

After receiving the team's sole spare car, Trulli went on to finish 6th in the restarted race to gain his and Prost's only point of the 1998 season. Both he and Panis remained at Prost until 2000, when Trulli moved to Jordan and Panis became McLaren's test driver.

Trivia

 * Francorchamps was the first of Nurse's works to be based on an actual event.
 * It is also the first, and so far only of his works to feature a real person as its protagonist.
 * Francorchamps was the first of Nurse's two Formula One-based projects, the other being The Ballad of Conor Stewart.
 * The original draft of the story was notable for its egregious use of semi-colons, even by Nurse's usual standards. The deviantART version is 1,304 words long but uses no less than 18 semi-colons, including five in the space of three sentences. The Project 20:15 version, although 200 words longer, uses only 10 semi-colons.