Chapter Text
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“Mate look at this picture,” Max said, turning his phone screen towards his friend beside him on the sofa of Lando’s Monaco apartment. Lando turned his head to take in the picture of himself in Parc Ferme immediately after the Canadian Grand Prix last weekend. He remembered the moment clearly, he had just taken his helmet off and was mid-discussion with an engineer about the race, but the picture showed so much more than that. Each drop of sweat on his face was visible as it dripped down from his hairline, and the lighting made it look like he was glowing, despite the exhaustion of 72 laps.
“Wow,” was Lando’s only response as he scrolled through the other photos in the Motorsport.com Instagram carousel but none of the others were anywhere near as good as the one that had caught Max’s attention.
“@OP81photography apparently.” Lando said reading the caption that listed all the photographers whose pictures had been included in the post. “Can you send me that post so I can repost it?” he asked, as he handed the phone back off to Max, picking his own phone up from where he’d discarded it in his lap.
Max grunted the affirmative and the pair fell back into silence as they scrolled through their socials, Lando sharing the photo to his story and thinking nothing more of it for the rest of the night.
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It took 10 minutes before Oscar Piastri worked out what was going on the next morning when he woke up. Most days the photographer would wake up to a handful of notifications, usually a message from his mum, maybe one from Logan and then a random collection of Instagram likes, messages and emails from publications asking to use his photos.
However, upon seeing the 1000s of notifications on his home screen, Oscar’s phone promptly crashed, forcing Oscar to restart the thing to begin working out what had happened the night before.
15 minutes later, Oscar was staring at Lando Norris’ story post, featuring the photo he had taken only 3 days prior. The post now had well over 100,000 likes, and his personal account had grown by nearly 15,000 followers but Oscar couldn’t help by sigh. He’d only sold that photo for £800, not even a fraction of the income Motorsport.com would make from it, and the picture was now being reposted across Instagram, without a credit to Oscar in sight.
In hopes of riding the wave a little longer, Oscar quickly put together another post of a few more photos of Lando he’d taken over the most recent Grand Prix weekend. None of them were quite as special as the one he’d sold to the magazine, but Oscar certainly wouldn’t go as far as to say they were bad pictures. He wasn’t sure if it was possible to take a bad photo of Lando.
@OP81photography: Looks like you lot like photos of this guy, thanks for the repost @LandoNorris. Barcelona next.
Another half hour later, one specific notification on Instagram caught his eye among the many others. @LandoNorris is now following you!
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Stood in the sun in Barcelona, Oscar had to admit he’d stumbled into a good deal of a profession. Like many of the drivers around him, Oscar had spent most of his youth at a karting track, however unlike them, he’d realised early on that he much preferred staying as still as possible to capture the best pictures of his cousins driving, than risking life and limb on track himself.
As his cousins had risen through the ranks of the karting world, Oscar’s skills had continued to develop and he’d earned a reputation across Australia as ‘that guy who takes photos at junior races’, which, in fairness, wasn’t exactly the ego boost he’d been looking for, but he still vividly remembered selling his first picture for $20 at age 13 of his eldest cousin competing in Formula Regional.
10 years later, Oscar was still taking photos of race cars and their drivers, only now he was being sent to the races by some of the biggest publishers in the world. Even his plane tickets were a tax write-off.
The screeching of engines snapped Oscar out of his thoughts, focusing in on the viewfinder as the Red Bull of Sergio Perez came around the first corner on his qualifying outlap. The rest of qualifying passed Oscar by in only a few seconds.
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Slumping down in his driver room, Lando let out a groan of frustration. Qualifying had been riddled with mistakes, none big enough that he was at the back of the grid, but enough for him to be bitterly disappointed with his performance.
Looking for a distraction, he reached for his phone, opening Instagram by default. The first post came from the photography account he’d followed on a whim last week. He didn’t usually follow anyone other than his friends and sponsors, but the reception to him reposting that photo (which many were going as far as to call a thirst trap) was so positive that he couldn’t resist.
@OP81photography: Mainly on track today but couldn’t resist having a look around the garages. Link to purchase rights in bio.
The post included 5 different shots of cars driving around the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, followed by another 5 shots of different drivers walking through the paddock. The last of which Lando realised was himself. In the picture he had his fireproofs down around his waist as he waved up to the crowds in the grandstands around him, clearly taken before his disappointing P7 performance. But somehow, like all the other pictures Lando had seen from this OP81 guy, he captured the moment perfectly, right down to the look of joy on the faces of the crowd he was waving to.
Lando liked the photo before opening the comments.
@f1g0rls: Yet again Oscar doing God’s work with the Lando pics
@georgeie2332: name a more talented photographer, i’ll wait
@notmyyuukki: these are all my new lock screen I love
45 minutes later, Lando was found still sitting on the floor of his driver's room in his race suit by his race engineer, scrolling through the photographer who he now knew was Oscar Piastri’s Instagram page.
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Oscar had watched in disbelief as notification after notification came in of The Lando Norris liking his Instagram posts. It would seem Lando had undertaken an hour-long stalk of Oscar’s page the night before, getting all the way down to his posts from 2019 before his rampage ended.
However, Oscar hadn’t had too long to stew over his new fan(?). Race days were always the busiest days for Oscar, and while his passion for photography had grown from taking pictures of cars racing, he couldn’t deny that the way to make money in this game was with good photos of the car’s drivers.
Media vest on, Oscar had made his way languidly up and down the pit lane as the teams readied themselves to line up on the grid, snapping shots of the drivers where he could get them, but as the final lap of the Grand Prix came to an end, this is where the real fun began.
Oscar watched through his viewfinder as the papaya McLaren of Lando Norris pulled in front of the P1 board, followed by Carlos Saniz’s Ferrari and Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes, the trio coming out on top of what had been an intense race.
Getting into the zone, Oscar took photo after photo as the drivers celebrated, and it was only when he got back to his hotel room and began to edit the photos hours later that he realised that there was one face that made up the majority of his camera roll.
Choosing from the hundreds of photos of Lando, and the combined 5 other good photos he’d taken of Lewis and Carlos, Oscar put together a standard race day Instagram post, tagging each of the drivers. Even Oscar himself had to admit the chosen picture of Lando was stunning, taken at the exact moment he’d popped his bottle of champagne against the podium step, surrounded by golden drops that caught the light as they made their way back down to earth.
@OP81photography: what a race and some good pics to go with it
It didn’t take long for the comments to flood in.
@x0hannah0x: I love how this is basically becoming a lando fan page
@3v3rything: another day of oscar capturing pure magic
But there was one comment in particular that caught his attention.
@LandoNorris: mate that picture is mint