Seeing a cloud of something in the background of a shot down the main straight, the commentators exclaimed, and soon footage cut to show a damaged car smashed into the wall just out of the fourth corner.
Alexa gasped and Tor felt his insides contract when the first thing he saw outside of the car’s crashed state was Uncle Zikki’s number twenty nine.
It wasn’t long before some replays were shown, to which Tor listened to as intently as the commentators’ chattering would allow to try and figure out why Uncle Zikki had smashed into the wall instead of completing the turn.
“Motor,” Opa said.
Tor nodded. It had sounded like something related to the motor to him too.
Once all the replays had been cycled through — including a replay of the red flag being waved calling off the session for safety reasons — the crashed car, now surrounded by medical personnel, was shown again.
Anxiously, Tor scanned among them for Uncle Zikki’s racing suit, which was predominantly blue, with trimmings that were mostly black and white, as well as his helmet, whose design Tor had always somewhat mimicked on his own helmet, but he saw no sign of them, or of Uncle Zikki’s custom racing boots which had black toes, red middles, and yellow heels, creating a sideways rendering of the German flag that was also a backdrop for Uncle Zikki’s personal logo, which combined his initials with his number.
The camera angle was changed and Tor felt hope as he saw Uncle Zikki moving in the car, into which medical personnel were reaching, working to help Uncle Zikki out of his belts and the close-fitting cockpit.
Tor was heartened by the cheers of the crowd as Uncle Zikki swung his own legs over the windshield and out of the cockpit while medical personnel helped him keep his balance.
On the racing surface, Uncle Zikki looked a bit unsteady, but he descended the banking with a medic’s arm around behind him and his own arm across the medic’s shoulder to the waiting ambulance.
The fact that he had needed to be helped out of his car and looked unsteady on his feet — not, Tor was sure, that the slope of the track was much help — left Tor feeling worried about Uncle Zikki.
He couldn’t deny, however, that he felt a touch of gratefulness now that the race wasn’t for a week yet, as that meant Uncle Zikki would have time to recover for the race instead of missing it owing to any injuries — unless things were worse than they seemed.
Once Uncle Zikki was sealed inside the ambulance, Tor looked at Alexa, whose gaze was still fixed on the screen, her anxiety showing on her face, one hand resting on her abdomen, almost as if she was trying to quiet the baby within her, despite the fact that he hadn’t seen what had happened to his father like she had.
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