Work Text:
Red Bull is more than just racing.
Obviously.
They’re an energy drink company that’s decided to just—sponsor insane people doing insane stuff. It’s their whole thing.
Red Bull have decided that their old brand of just hyping people up by giving people energy wasn’t demonstrative enough of the sheer caffeine they could pump into one’s veins if they got past the taste of it enough.
So now, Red Bull Athletes are a thing.
There’s a few of them in every sport, some sports more than others.
Max is, of course, on Red Bull Racing: one of two Formula 1 teams.
Sometimes Max gets to meet other Red Bull athletes, though, because they’re all in contract with the same company and they can cross promote it on social media enough. It’s often with other vehicle drivers.
He meets up with other Formula drivers: like Tomoki and Ayumu in Japan, Josep, Nikola, and Arvid in F1, and Tim, Oliver, and Mattia in Formula Three.
The MotoGP guys occasionally show up. Pedro, David, Diogo, Tony, Albert, Enea, Brad, Stefan before he moved to Superbike, and like thirty more people at any given time. There’s so many of them, Max can’t keep track.
That’s not even counting the Rally Raid members Max got to film with twice last year, or the touring car guys that occasionally get pulled in, Trophy Truck people who keep doing stunts with the test drivers… Red Bull has way too many different types of motorsport, in Max’s opinion. But they do give him a job, so who is he to complain?
Besides, he has the emails of everyone competing in WRC, V8, and WEC at his disposal when he decides to hop racing categories, eventually. It’s one of the reasons he’s been able to do testing and join events so quickly so far.
But Red Bull doesn’t limit their insanity to motorsports.
They sponsor normal athletes in football, cricket, hockey, skiing, material arts, volleyball, and swimming. Things that you’d see in the Olympics. Max understands this.
He also understands the athletic non-sport stuff they have going on: triathletes, surfers, runners, kayaking, exploration, dance, even an aerobatic flying team. He’d probably consider F1 in this area too, and he knows that they all take tremendous physical skill.
But Chess?
Symphony Orchestra?
They’re skilled, but Max can’t quite picture how the energy drink aspect makes sense. Maybe during an epic beat drop? Or like Tania just downs a can in seven seconds flat once she reaches checkmate.
He’s at a Red Bull athlete meet-up, because he has to be, and they’ve gone ahead and done some placematting so that they talk to people they usually wouldn’t. Which is fair, Max would probably just retreat to his F1 teammate and the rookies if he could. But no– he’s at a table with some paragliding people and esports. Gaming.
He shakes hands and nods, very uncomfortable.
As soon as he can, Max sits down in the chair with his name and little “F1 Driver” designation beneath it, checking his phone to no notifications because he isn’t online all the time.
The guy next to him also sits down, looking a little overwhelmed.
“Hey,” the guy says. “I’m Ludwig, nice to meet you.”
Max shakes his hand, looking at the little placemat that says “Gaming Various” under the dude, Ludwig’s name. He briefly saw one with “Valorant” and another with “FIFA” under it, so he guesses that this dude doesn’t play in an esport professionally.
“You are one of the esports people?” He asks, because he can be polite and it’s the only thing he really knows.
“Yeah! Yeah, esports, that’s me,” Ludwig says. “All of you guys are like, real athletes. So maybe we stick out a little, huh?”
“No, no, nothing like that,” Max says. “Everyone in this room is pretty buff, yeah, but your little name thing says it.”
Ludwig looks down, and over.
“Oh. It does. Huh.”
Max laughs a little.
“You can see mine,” Max says. “I do Formula 1. When Liam and Ayumu stop talking, they will tell you they drive Formula as well.”
“That’s really cool man,” Ludwig says. “I don’t really watch it, but I’ve seen clips on the socials.”
Max nods. He stays off social media when he can, but their social media is pretty cool.
“They make us do lots of stunts,” Max says. “The real races are I think either more boring because you do not care or more exciting because there is real danger.”
Ludwig nods as if this makes sense, and then they’re trapped by awkward silence.
Some guy behind him is making emphatic gestures talking about a breakdancing move he did off a cliff or something to one of their hockey girls who looks like she could pound Max into the ground, but is smiling very politely.
Everyone in this room really is very buff.
The silence is still stretching between them.
“So,” Max says, a little desperate. “Gaming Various?”
“Yeah,” Ludwig says. He says that a lot. He’s probably American. “It’s what I stream, on Twitch, if you know what that is.”
Max nods, happily.
“I am part of an iRacing simulator esports team,” Max says. “Team Redline. We go live on Twitch, but I just go in the Discord sometimes to join. I don’t really know how the platform works in general, other than to watch FIFA sometimes.”
“Ah, you get it then,” Ludwig says. “Yeah, I do Twitch and YouTube full time, and as part of that I do lots of games.”
“Like what?” Max asks.
“Well, I’m pretty known for my Mario Party Records,” Ludwig says. “But I do in-person game shows, Minecraft, FPS games, and lots of general knowledge games. Like, facing off against specialized streamers in games like online chess, or battleship, things like that. Whatever’s popular, really.”
“Are they your favorites?” Max asks.
“It depends,” Ludwig says. “I’m honestly pretty bad at a lot of them, but it’s entertaining to watch me fail I guess.”
“I also like games I am bad at, though,” Max says. “It is fun to beat my friends, but I like to have fun too.”
“That’s exactly how I feel about Geoguessr,” Ludwig says. “I’ve been trying to get better at it for years, and I’ve had guys coach me on all the tips, but sometimes you just have to know.”
“Geoguessr?” Max says. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“Oh, it’s pretty cool,” Ludwig says. “You get put into Google Maps based on the kind of map you choose, and you have to select where you are. So you could choose monuments, or areas with flags in it, but most people just choose the whole world. Great for geography nerds, language nerds, people who really like specific countries…”
Max turns his legs over to the side so he can talk to Ludwig better without craning his neck.
“I used to like geography as a kid,” he said. “Tell me more, please.”
—
Max types Geoguesser into his search bar less than two days later.
It’s the off-season. He has the time.
It’s not hard to find even though he’s slightly misspelled the name.
He finds that while it used to be free, you need a “Pro Subscription” to play, but it’s honestly really cheap. A few euro for a month? That’s nothing. He goes through the process and puts his name in, even though there’s no verification thing so there’s probably dozens of other accounts using his name on there.
(He checks. There is. Lots of them are American, for some reason.)
There’s a little tutorial where he goes through guessing on his little map in the corner and getting confetti when he finds where he is. They show him exactly how far away he is, and Max immediately has fun zooming in and out to see where he could have gone.
The landmarks map, which is indeed a recommended map, is pretty easy. Except for some historical ones. Max skived off lots of school, lots of history, so he knows what the Sydney Opera House is but a room full of stone statues? No clue.
It’s very fun.
Max plays the “Diverse World” map because it’s also recommended and immediately hates the time limit.
Max is on a dirt road, somewhere.
Where? He has no clue! There aren’t any signs! Max putters down the road as far as he can with no sign of life before the two minute timer goes off and he has no points for the round because that was Australia.
How Max was supposed to know that, he has no idea.
The next round, Max finds all the controls and immediately turns the time limit off.
Now, now Max has fun.
He clicks around until he finds a sign with a language, or after looking up a few short videos online, looks at the sky and plants.
Max narrows things down very very close.
He uses the search function, finds the Monaco map, and has a great deal of fun placing the pin exactly where it needs to be. Monte Carlo is so small the points are much harder so he has to be on the right side of the street signs and everything.
Once, he gets right outside his favorite brunch spot after padel when he can be bothered to socialize.
He finds it very quickly, and clicks with pride on the map.
Before Max goes to bed that night, he watches numerous people playing Geoguessr, doing very well and doing very poorly.
He even finds a video of Ludwig. He’s right: he’s not the best, he’s getting crushed by the Rainbolt guy he’s up against, but he doesn’t suck as badly as he’d made it seem.
Max falls asleep thinking of trees and flags and mountains and everywhere his car could take him, if he wanted.
Max plays Geoguessr for weeks.
He knows that when the season hits he’ll have less time, and Max already breaks it up with FIFA and Sim training and hanging out with family and going on vacation and yacht trips and all that, but he’s enjoying it.
“What is that?” Charles asks when he breaks into Max’s apartment to pet his cats and talk about who else they know that has now talked to his mom for half an hour over their haircut. Pascale has class, she doesn’t spread gossip around, but she lets things slip occasionally. Then Charles spreads it around because he’s a terror and menace to society.
“It’s a video game,” Max says.
“Well yes of course,” Charles says. “I can see that. I like your little outfit. What is it, though? A sport or like, the block one?”
“Neither,” Max says. “It’s Google Maps, and you find where you are.”
“What?” Charles says.
“Just, come watch,” Max says, and walks over. He picks the landmarks one, because Charles would understand that. They immediately get the Eiffel Tower, then the Colosseum, which Charles names, and watches Max locate. Then, they get a church that Max has seen before and immediately tracks down in Spain.
This shocks Charles, but he gets the idea.
“So it’s just that?” Charles asks.
“Well, no,” Max says. “It’s like this,” and clicks onto Diverse World.
The screen pixelates then loads into the slums of a city.
“Where is that?” Charles says. “I’ve never seen that before.”
“Well,” Max says, zooming in on a sign. “This looks like Spanish. It’s got the latin letters, so we’re probably not in India or somewhere else in Asia.”
He clicks around, trying to look at the trees.
“It’s pretty tropical, and we can’t see any roads. I’m going to guess Brazil, because you don’t want to sit here for hours,” Max says. He clicks around to find a slightly northern big city.
There’s confetti as he gets 832 points, because it was actually in Peru. Close, but not close enough.
“Huh,” Charles says.
Max loads the next one in, and it’s a highway in America.
After that, it’s in Thailand. Max gets over 4000 points for that one because the letters on it only matched a specific shape he’s seen in that area of the map.
“You find this fun?” Charles asks. “I don’t think it would be fun unless I knew the answers.”
“Well, we get to go to lots of these places,” Max says. “I travel lots compared to people like my sister, or the random people who go to just one of our races.”
Charles hums.
“It’s just fun to see what else is out there,” Max says. The game ends. It’s nowhere near his best score, but it was good to show Charles the variety of it all.
And it is.
Part of Max loves it all. The different countries, the different people, the food they could see and places they work.
It’s like Max is five years old again, looking at the big map on his wall, all the flags and country names, all the places he could race in.
The world had shrunk, at some point, when Max started exploring it.
His private jet took him to both hemispheres and his car took him around the best tracks and Max had lost sight of how big it was and how small he is.
But really, how much has Max seen? He's lived in four odd countries, visited cities in a few dozen more, and he still can't grasp everything that pixelates onto his screen in an instant.
So he clicks around Geoguessr when he has a free half hour.
Maybe one day he'll travel to all of it. Until then, it's here.
Quietly waiting for Max to see, learn, and explore.