The Gravitational Pull

Autumn, 2023

October in Texas carries a particular quality of light. Sharp and golden, with none of the hazy intensity of summer. As Circuit of the Americas baked under the autumn sunshine, Alexander Macalister found himself in an unexpected state of distraction.

He’d been mid-stride through the Ferrari hospitality centre when he first heard her laugh. Bright and disarmingly honest with the slightest hint of a Texan drawl cutting through the formal murmur of sponsor conversations.

I’ve witnessed this same laugh myself, sitting across from Gemma Rhodes on her family’s veranda. It has a quality of unguarded warmth that stands out in the carefully modulated world of elite athletics. When she welcomed me into her home for our interviews, I understood immediately how that sound might have stopped Alexander in his tracks.

“I was supposed to be checking setup options with Ricci,” Alexander admits when I press him about their first meeting. “Instead, I found myself watching this woman I didn’t know, talking with our PR team. It just… completely derailed me.”

For a man who had spent the past year and a half hardening himself, channelling the pain of Abu Dhabi into a single-minded focus on improvement, this momentary distraction was noteworthy in itself. Since that devastating championship loss, Alexander had systematically eliminated anything that didn’t contribute directly to his performance. Yet here he was, forgetting his purpose, drawn by a laugh.

While others in the paddock may have seen merely another VIP guest, Alexander had spent the hours afterwards meticulously researching Gemma Rhodes on his phone between meetings. Wikipedia entries, Olympic highlight reels, technical breakdowns of her gold medal routines. It wasn’t just her achievements that had captured his attention, but the artistry beneath the precision, the way she brought emotional resonance to movements executed with mathematical accuracy. By the time they were introduced, he understood something few others at the circuit recognised: the woman in the Ferrari hospitality area had achieved in her field, three times over, what Alexander still pursued in his.

What followed would become part of their private mythology, with slightly different versions depending on who tells the story. Alexander insists it was “pure Ferrari PR scheduling” that led to him driving Gemma for her VIP hot lap that day, his eyes finding sudden fascination with the rim of his coffee cup. Julia Worthington, Ferrari’s Head of Press Operations for the Americas, remembers it differently.

“He practically engineered a hostage exchange,” she tells me with fond exasperation. “Offered extra media in Brazil, personal appearances, anything to swap duties with Charles that weekend. In seven years, I’d never seen any driver volunteer for VIP duties, least of all him.”

By the time he slid behind the wheel of the Ferrari SF90 Stradale Assetto Fiorano for Gemma’s VIP hot lap experience, Alexander had already researched her career. The Olympic medals, injury comeback, technical innovations on beam exercise. This wasn’t merely professional courtesy; it was genuine interest. Something new was stirring beneath the carefully constructed armour he’d built since Abu Dhabi.

“Most people ask about the sparkly leotards,” Gemma recalls with a smile. “Alexander asked about competing on four inches of wood with no margin for error. About the psychology of performing when one hesitation means everything collapses.”

As they circled the track, the conversation moved beyond the standard commentary about braking points and racing lines. Alexander guided the car with precise, economical movements, taking one hand off the wheel briefly to illustrate the flow of a corner sequence. Gemma instinctively tightened her grip on the armrest before something in his unhurried delivery helped her relax.

“Try engaging your core here,” he suggested as they navigated the left-right-left chicane, “the same way you would during a tumbling pass.”

Gemma followed his advice, activating the deep abdominal muscles drilled into her since childhood. To her relief, it helped ground her against the lateral forces. “That’s when I realised he actually understood something of what I did,” she told me. “Not just as something impressive, but as a physical discipline with its own technical language.”

When Alexander mentioned the pressure of qualifying laps, Gemma nodded knowingly. “Ninety seconds to be perfect with millions watching,” she said. “And somehow you have to make your mind forget all of that.” Alexander glanced at her, surprised by the precision of her understanding.

“There was this moment of recognition,” Alexander explains. “She understood what it meant to pursue perfection while making it look effortless. To convert years of practice into seconds of performance.”

The perfect line in racing is mythical. Always pursued but never fully attained. This became the metaphor for their connection, Alexander explaining how a perfect lap remains perpetually elusive. “You can always find another hundredth somewhere.” Gemma immediately recognised the parallel to gymnastics, that same perpetual chase after an ideal that recedes as you approach it.

I asked him about the experience of driving with her that day. I expected an answer related to the way the SF90 responded to his inputs, or how he modulated the throttle through the complex sequences of COTA’s undulating middle sector.

“She was brilliant,” he says and he seemingly relives the moment again. “The way she absorbed everything. Asking about racing lines before I’d even explained them properly, spotting the apex points, understanding weight transfer through corners because of her gymnastics.” He pauses, that distinctive smile spreading wider. “When we came out of the Esses and she laughed. Properly laughed at the acceleration… I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed showing someone the track more.”

When they completed their laps and the car slowed to approach the waiting PR team, Alexander found himself reluctant to end the conversation. “You’re here for the whole weekend, right?” he asked as Gemma prepared to exit the car.

She paused, half in and half out of the Ferrari, and fixed him with a look that was both challenging and playful. “I’ll consider it,” she said, “if you have more to show me.” Then she closed the door with decisive finality and walked away with the smallest hint of a skip in her step.

For a man who had spent the past year building walls around his vulnerability, this unexpected connection offered something different. A counterbalance. A reminder that excellence existed beyond the paddock, and that someone might understand the peculiar isolation it created.

“Alexander after Abu Dhabi was… more guarded,” Amy Millie reflects. “Intensely focused. I guess focused on never experiencing that kind of disappointment again. With Gemma, I saw glimpses of the Alexander before. The curious observer, the person capable of joy and not just achievement.”

Their connection flourished precisely because of their shared understanding. Both lived in worlds where perfection was simultaneously the goal and the impossibility. Both understood the weight of expectation, the discipline required to perform when millions are watching, the way you must convert private practice into public excellence.

“Most people either trivialise what we do or mythologize it,” Alexander explains. “Gemma saw it clearly. Both the privilege and the sacrifice.”

As his 2023 season progressed, those around Alexander noticed subtle changes. The intensity remained, but there was a new balance to it. Something had softened around the edges without diminishing his drive.

“I saw him smile more,” Charles Leclerc tells me. “Not just the polite media smile, but genuine moments of… I don’t know how to describe it. Presence? Like his mind wasn’t always racing ahead to the next improvement.”

What began with a laugh that caught Alexander off-guard would evolve into something neither of them had anticipated. A gravitational pull that temporarily altered his carefully plotted trajectory, showing him possibilities beyond the singular focus that had defined him since Abu Dhabi. As Ferrari’s 2024 car became increasingly competitive, these two gravitational forces, championship and connection, would create the tension that defined his most pivotal year.

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THE DINNER RECONSTRUCTION

There is a peculiar joy in visiting places of significance in someone else’s story. Standing where they once stood, seeing what they once saw, as if by proximity alone one might access some residual emotion left behind. It was this curiosity that led me to the modest Thai restaurant during my extended stay in Austin.

“That little Thai place over there, next to the vintage shop,” Alexander had pointed out as we drove past during the 2025 Grand Prix weekend. “That’s where it happened. Our first… real conversation.” There was a softness to his voice I’d rarely heard when discussing places or moments.

Lemongrass Thai Kitchen sits on a quiet street away from downtown Austin’s bustle. Exactly the sort of establishment whose patrons wouldn’t recognise an F1 driver, especially one who wasn’t yet world champion, nor an Olympic gymnast attempting a rare evening of anonymity. It’s small and unassuming, with warm yellow walls and wooden tables polished smooth from years of use. The sort of place locals protect from tourists.

The manager’s eyes brightened when I mentioned Alexander and Gemma.

“They sat there,” Suthep said, pointing to a corner table partially obscured by a beaded curtain. “The young couple who stayed until closing. I had to eventually tell them we needed to lock up!” He chuckled, gesturing at a framed photograph near the register of Alexander and Gemma, smiling alongside the staff from two years earlier. “They talked like they’d known each other forever.”

Alexander had shared with me his recollection of that evening: “I remember thinking it was the first time I’d lost track of time since… well, since I can remember. We kept ordering more tea just to have an excuse to stay.”

For someone whose life operates on a schedule managed down to five-minute increments, this surrender to the pleasure of conversation represented a significant departure. In my months of observing Alexander, I’ve noted how his meticulous timekeeping seems less about efficiency and more about creating structure. A framework of control in a sport defined by risk. Yet here, in this unassuming restaurant, he had apparently forgotten to check his watch entirely.

“We talked about everything that night. Not just racing and gymnastics,” he’d told me. “Architecture, travel, books we’d read. Things normal people talk about.” The longing in the word “normal” was palpable.

After our first interview in Texas, Gemma had sent me a text that added colour to Alexander’s polished recollection: “More tea? Ask him about how he couldn’t pronounce ‘gymnastics’ after three glasses of wine. Or how he tried to explain downforce using spring rolls and sauce bottles. There was more laughter that night than I thought was possible. Let alone with someone I had just met hours before.”

She’d added later during our lake house conversation: “What surprised me was how quickly we moved from small talk to things that mattered. I mentioned something about the mental challenge of performing under pressure, and he immediately understood in a way most people never could. There’s this peculiar loneliness in elite sports. Being surrounded by people but feeling fundamentally separate. Alexander let me express that in ways I had never been able to explain before.”

The waitress I met added another dimension: “They were sweet together. It was obvious they had a great connection. The way she’d laugh. The way he’d lean in when she spoke like he was afraid to miss a word.” Then, with a conspiratorial smile: “Though y’all should’ve heard her when she got comfortable! That Texas drawl came out strong, especially when she was teasing him about something. And he loved it! You could tell by his face, even though he pretended to be horrified by her accent.”

Such details might seem insignificant. The positioning of bodies across a table, the quiet attentiveness to another’s voice, the emergence of authentic regional inflections. Yet in the context of Alexander Macalister, a man whose physical movements are typically as deliberate as his word choices, these small surrenders to natural impulse reveal volumes. And for Gemma Rhodes, three-time Olympic gold medallist accustomed to maintaining composure under global scrutiny, this unguarded display of her roots signalled a rare comfort.

When I asked the manager if he knew who they were at the time, he nodded his head. “Some of the staff realised, of course. But that night? They were just two people who couldn’t stop talking.”

For a brief evening in this unassuming space, two people whose lives were defined by discipline and expectation found something increasingly rare in their worlds: authenticity without performance, connection without agenda. The beginning of something neither could have anticipated. A relationship between equals who recognised in each other something both familiar and extraordinary.

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THE LOGISTICAL CHALLENGE

Alexander’s meticulously maintained calendar from this period reveals a complex choreography of international travel that would exhaust even the most seasoned diplomat. Looking at the colour-coded digital schedule Claudia shared with me one can chart the evolution of his relationship with Gemma through an increasingly complicated web of transatlantic flights.

Between November 2023 and June 2024, Alexander crossed the Atlantic seventeen times beyond his racing obligations. The calendar entries grow more frequent as months progress, with cryptic notations like “G.E.D.” appearing regularly. Claudia later confirmed that stood for “Gemma Escape Day,” blocks of time Alexander insisted be protected for these whirlwind visits.

“I’d never seen him request schedule modifications like that before,” Claudia told me during our interview at Ferrari headquarters. “Alexander typically accepts whatever commitments we place in front of him. But suddenly he was sending me messages like: ‘Need to be in Houston by Friday 18:00, non-negotiable.’” She laughed, shaking her head at the memory. “The first time it happened, I thought there must be some sort of emergency.”

Each visit required extraordinary planning on both sides. Gemma’s calendar, which she later shared with me, revealed an equally complex juggling act. As a technical advisor to the Olympic team, her commitments often took her to training camps across America and occasionally to international competitions where she mentored younger gymnasts.

“I had obligations I couldn’t shift,” Gemma explained during our conversation at her family’s lake house. “USA Gymnastics doesn’t reschedule national team camps for anyone’s boyfriend, not even a Ferrari driver.” Her Texan vowels stretched slightly on the word ‘boyfriend’, a hint of the playful lilt that Alexander had confessed was both irresistible and disarming to him.

Race weekends would conclude Sunday evening, with Alexander often flying directly to Texas Sunday night or Monday morning. He would spend sometimes as little as twenty-four hours with Gemma before flying back to Europe for simulator work, sponsor obligations, or factory visits in Maranello.

“The recovery protocols went out the window,” Adamo explained during our conversation in the backroom of the Ferrari hospitality suite. “Alexander has always been disciplined about post-race recovery. The specific sleep schedules, nutritional plans, physical therapy. But suddenly he was willing to spend eight hours on a plane immediately after the physical toll of a Grand Prix, burning through his recovery window.”

Claudia pulled out a folder containing flight manifestos and receipts. “Look at the São Paulo-Austin flight after Brazil. He finished the race at 16:52 local time and was on a private plane by 19:30. Adamo nearly had a conniption.”

Gemma, for her part, was making similar sacrifices, though perhaps with more experience in balancing competing priorities. “We shared this Google doc,” Gemma told me, “tracking our respective commitments week by week, trying to find those rare overlapping windows where neither of us had immovable obligations.”

These scheduling documents which Gemma shared with me reveal a relationship conducted in carefully negotiated increments: 32 hours in Houston, 41 hours in Milan, a luxurious 4 days during the Christmas break in Texas. Two elite athletes attempting to align orbits that were fundamentally designed to diverge.

More revealing than the logistics were Alexander’s handwritten notes in his racing journal from this period. Between detailed technical observations about car behaviour and tyre degradation, personal reminders appear with increasing frequency: “Call G before quali,” “Ask G about her physio’s recommendation for shoulder,” “Remember Olympics broadcast time.”

A notation after the Australian Grand Prix reads: “Down on pace in S3. Rear instability under braking + camber issue? Discuss with Ricci. Confirm Houston next weekend.”

During a particularly exhausting stretch in April, Gemma had scribbled her own note in Alexander’s journal when he’d stepped away to shower away the jet lag in their hotel suite: “Seven hours of travel for five hours together. Still worth it.” He’d later confessed that finding her handwriting among his technical notes had affected him more deeply than he expected.

“I probably flew too much, slept too little,” Alexander admitted when I asked him about this period. “It wasn’t sustainable, but I couldn’t help myself. There was something about being with Gemma that made me feel… I don’t know, not that nothing else mattered, but kind of.”

“The crazy thing is,” Amy reflected, “for all the logistical gymnastics, it probably amounted to less than thirty actual days together over seven months. But looking at how he rearranged everything else in his life to make those days happen. I’d never seen Alexander invest in anything that wasn’t directly related to making the car go faster.”

For Gemma, the pattern was familiar from a different perspective. “I’d already been through the phase of my life where sport consumed everything,” she explained. “After you stand on that Olympic podium, you start to see more clearly what you’ve sacrificed. I think I recognised in Alexander someone at a different point in that journey. Still fully in the grip of that singular focus, but starting to question whether there might be more.”

This willingness to disrupt his meticulously constructed world stands as testament to the unique connection they had found, and explains why its eventual unravelling would prove so painful for both. Not simply because of what they shared in those stolen moments, but because of what those moments revealed about the lives they might someday build beyond the constraints of their respective sporting worlds.

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December 2023

The Rhodes family ranch sits on fifteen acres of undulating Texas countryside, the kind of expansive American homestead that doesn’t exist in Europe’s tightly contained boundaries. Christmas lights outline its wooden frame, trailing down to a sprawling oak tree wrapped in thousands of twinkling bulbs. Inside, the kitchen emanates warmth and laughter, the incessant chatter of four generations mingling with Christmas music and the clinking of glasses.

In the midst of this festive chaos stands Alexander Macalister. Ferrari standard-bearer, and at this moment, a man visibly overwhelmed by the unfamiliar rhythms of family life.

“He looked like he might bolt for the door when we first arrived,” Gemma recalls with a gentle laugh during our second interview at her family home. “My family can be… a lot. Four siblings, their partners, nieces and nephews, my grandparents. Everyone talking over each other, Christmas music blaring, my dad insisting Alexander help him finish hanging lights even though it was already Christmas Eve.”

Then, with characteristic insight, she adds, “But I recognised that look. It’s the same one I had before my first Olympic event. Overwhelmed but determined to rise to the occasion.”

Yet within hours, something remarkable happened. The Alexander I’ve come to know through my research, measured, precise, always maintaining careful distance, began to thaw. By Christmas morning, he was on the floor building LEGO sets with Gemma’s nephews, patiently helping her grandfather navigate Netflix on a new iPad, and solemnly accepting her grandmother’s decree that he was “too skinny” and needed a third helping of everything.

For Alexander, whose Christmas celebrations since his parents’ deaths had been reduced to perfunctory acknowledgments usually spent at the nearly empty Ferrari dormitory or later, alone in his apartment, this immersion in family tradition was simultaneously foreign and achingly familiar.

“The Rhodes family was very welcoming,” he tells me, his expression softening slightly when I ask about the experience. “They didn’t treat me like an F1 driver or make a fuss. I was just Gemma’s… person and she was bringing me home.”

What he doesn’t say, though his hesitation speaks volumes, is how profoundly disorienting it must have been to suddenly find himself part of the tableau he’d lost: a family Christmas, with all its chaotic warmth and unconscious rituals.

“Mrs. Rhodes makes these incredible cinnamon rolls from scratch on Christmas morning,” he offers after a thoughtful pause. “The whole family sits around in pyjamas waiting for them to come out of the oven. No one gets dressed or opens presents until they’ve had cinnamon rolls. It’s a whole ceremony.”

The wonder in his voice as he describes this ordinary family tradition speaks volumes about what was missing from his meticulously organised existence.

Riccardo Adami, his race engineer, noticed the change when Alexander returned to Maranello in January. “He came back different,” Adami tells me. “Still focused, still precise, but with something… how do you say… lighter? As if he had remembered there was more to life than milliseconds and downforce figures.”

What Alexander doesn’t happen to mention though Gemma and her mother both do, is how he slipped away from the festivities at one point, finding a quiet corner to make a phone call. This wasn’t business or racing; it was Alexander calling Amy Millie to wish her happy holidays, followed by calls to Adamo Bianchi and Claudia Rossi. His chosen family, the constants in his life since losing his parents.

“That really touched Mom,” Gemma says. “She understood then that Alexander has built his own kind of family over the years. Different, but no less real.”

Gemma’s smile widens with another memory. “I found him in the kitchen at 7 AM on the day after Christmas, you know. My mother had him in an apron, teaching him her secret recipe for those cinnamon rolls. She’s normally terribly protective of her recipes. We joke that you need security clearance to get them. But there they were, Alexander taking meticulous mental notes like it was an engineering briefing while she showed him how to knead the dough just right.”

Later that evening at the Rhodes’ home, after presents had been opened and dinner consumed, Alexander found himself at the family piano. An upright Baldwin that had seen better days. Gemma’s young niece had been attempting “Jingle Bells” with limited success. Without fanfare, Alexander slid onto the bench beside her, gently guiding her to the right keys.

As the child’s bedtime approached, he remained at the piano. The house gradually quieted as the family gathered in the living room, conversation fading as Alexander began to play. Not Christmas carols, but Debussy’s “Clair de Lune”. The piece his mother had taught him, a connection to his earliest memories of family and belonging.

“Nobody moved,” Gemma remembers, her voice softening at the memory. “My family isn’t exactly known for sitting still or being quiet, but everyone just… stopped. There was Alexander, who’d spent the day fitting himself into our traditions, suddenly sharing something profoundly his own.”

“I hadn’t played for anyone before that,” Alexander admits when I ask about this moment. “It wasn’t planned. The piano was badly out of tune, actually.” A pause, then: “It felt right somehow. Like… the only way of finding the right words at that moment.”

Later that night, after the house had quieted and the Christmas lights cast soft shadows across the living room, Alexander and Gemma found themselves alone. The family piano stood silent now, but its presence seemed to linger in the room like a third person.

“Your family’s incredible,” Alexander said softly, his fingers absently tracing patterns on Gemma’s forearm. “Thank you for bringing me here.”

Gemma nodded, tucking herself closer beside him. “You were incredible tonight. I’ve never seen Mom cry for music before.”

Alexander was quiet for a long moment, his gaze fixed on the piano.

“You remember that night at my place? When you heard me playing?” he finally asked.

“When you thought I was asleep?” Gemma smiled. “Of course.”

Alexander nodded. “I stopped as soon as I realised you were there. I wanted to keep going, to share that with you, but I just… couldn’t.”

He shifted, running a hand through his hair in that way he did when wrestling with something difficult.

“The piano in my house… it’s the same one from my childhood home,” he continued. “After Mum died, it sat there in our living room. This massive, unavoidable reminder of her absence. Dad couldn’t bear to get rid of it, but he couldn’t look at it either.”

His voice softened. “For me, it became the only tangible connection I had left to her. Something of wood and solidness that my fingers could touch exactly where hers had. The same keys, the same sounds.”

Gemma remained silent, her hand finding his.

“When Dad died and I had to deal with the house, I knew I had to keep it. I put it into storage until I had somewhere with space for it. It cost a small fortune to transport, many times more than I could have bought a better one for, but it was non-negotiable for me.”

He smiled faintly. “I remember the shipping company thought I was mad. ‘You could buy a new Steinway for what this will cost to ship,’ they told me. But it wasn’t about having a piano. It was about having her piano.”

Alexander looked at Gemma directly now. “I don’t practice any more, but I play when I think of her, but always alone. It’s like… my most private conversation with her, in a language only we shared. Tonight was the first time since she died that I’ve played for anyone. For a family. For a home that felt like a home.”

His voice caught slightly. “I want to be more open with you, Gemma. I want to be my whole self with you. But sometimes I don’t know how. These neat boxes, these compartments I’ve built… they’ve kept me functioning for so long that I’m not sure I know how to exist without them.”

Gemma squeezed his hand. “You don’t have to dismantle everything at once, sweetie,” she said, her accent warming the words. “Just maybe install a few doors between the rooms instead of keeping all those walls solid.”

Alexander laughed softly at that, the tension breaking. “Doors between compartments. I like that metaphor.”

“Well, I do have to justify that communications degree LSU gave me while I was busy in the gym,” she teased with a wink. “Got to get someone’s money’s worth, even if it wasn’t mine.” Then, growing serious again: “What you shared tonight. With my family, with me right now. That’s a door swinging open. That counts for something.”

He nodded, allowing himself to lean into her warmth. “It’s terrifying,” he admitted. “But it’s also… I don’t know. It feels right. Like finding the correct braking point after you’ve been getting it wrong for laps.”

“The perfect line,” Gemma murmured.

“The perfect line,” he echoed, his fingers interlaced with hers. “I’m still learning how to find it off the track.”

During our conversation at his home months later, I notice a handmade Christmas ornament displayed in a small glass case. Incongruous among the carefully curated minimalism. It’s clearly a child’s work: a clay star painted in uneven strokes of red and gold, with “Uncle Alex” scratched into it in wobbly letters.

“Gemma’s niece made it for me,” he explains simply when he catches me looking. The fact that he keeps this humble gift displayed year-round, preserved like a precious artefact, speaks volumes about what that Christmas represented.

This Christmas interlude offered Alexander a glimpse of an alternative existence. Not just time away from racing, but immersion in a way of life defined by connection rather than competition, by belonging rather than achievement.

The experience both enriched and complicated his perspective. While it provided respite from the singular focus that had dominated his life since Abu Dhabi, it also presented questions he wasn’t prepared to answer. Could these worlds coexist? Could the Alexander who built LEGO with children and played piano for family be reconciled with the driver who had dedicated everything to championship attainment?

“I think he needed that more than either of us realised,” Gemma reflects. “Not just to rest physically, but to remember that there’s life beyond the paddock. That connection matters.”

She has unique insight into Alexander’s carefully structured psychology. “As an athlete, a competitor, I developed my own methods of mental compartmentalisation. Necessary tools for performing under pressure,” she explains. “The difference was that I had been taught to create those compartments but also how to integrate them afterward. Alexander had learned the first skill through necessity after losing his parents, but never acquired the second. His compartments had become concrete bunkers rather than boxes. Effective for functioning through loss but limiting for connecting through vulnerability.”

When they returned to their respective worlds something had shifted. The rhythm of family life had awakened echoes of what he’d lost, while simultaneously highlighting the chosen family he’d built.

In his carefully compartmentalised existence, Alexander had created space for racing excellence, for technical perfection, for the relentless pursuit of improvement. What the Rhodes family Christmas provided was permission to create space for something else: connection for its own sake, joy without purpose, belonging without performance.

As Amy later realised, hearing about their Christmas together from Gemma: “The bit about him thanking everyone for ordinary kindnesses, as if being included was this extraordinary gift he hadn’t expected’. That cut deep. Because of course it would be extraordinary to him. When was the last time Alex was simply included in something with no expectations, no performance required, nothing to prove?”

For a man whose journey toward championship glory had been fuelled by successive losses, this temporary belonging offered a different kind of momentum. Not the propulsive force of defying gravity, but the gravitational pull of connection. Both forces would prove essential in the physics of his development, creating the equilibrium that would ultimately carry him to the championship that awaited.

Months later, when I ask Alexander what he took from that Christmas experience, he considers the question with obvious care before responding.

“I think I started to think about what ‘home’ meant to me for the first time since I was a child,” he says quietly. The significance of this admission isn’t lost on either of us. Home, for Alexander, had become a concept associated with loss rather than presence, with past rather than possibility. Until a Texas ranch-house at Christmas showed him another way.

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THE BALANCED INTERLUDE (late 2023-early 2024)

In late 2023, for approximately four months, according to those closest to him, Alexander achieved something like balance. A concept previously foreign to his single-minded existence. The evidence of this phase exists in fragments: adjusted training schedules, calendar modifications, text messages, and the observations of his inner circle.

The training records Adamo Bianchi shared reveal subtle adjustments to Alexander’s recovery protocols during this period. A willingness to compromise on certain aspects while maintaining core performance metrics. Adamo, typically rigid about Alexander’s physical regime, began incorporating more flexibility.

“I modified his training blocks to accommodate the travel,” Adamo explained while showing me the spreadsheets of Alexander’s performance data. “But the interesting thing was his numbers actually improved in several areas. His focus during our sessions was sharper, his recovery rates better. When I asked what had changed, he just smiled and said, ‘I’m living better.’”

Claudia’s meticulous scheduling notes show the emergence of cryptic blocks labelled simply “G time”. Periods that gradually expanded from tightly constrained hours to full weekends. “By December, I knew better than to even suggest alternative uses for those time slots,” Claudia told me. “They became as immovable as race weekends.”

Most revealing are the text exchanges between Alexander and Gemma from this period, which Alexander rather surprisingly permitted me to view (with certain conversations redacted and Gemma’s blessing obtained). Their digital correspondence evolved from formal planning to an intimate shorthand that reflected their deepening connection.

Early messages contain careful coordination:

Alexander: Landing 16:30 your time. Hotel first or straight to dinner?

Gemma: Dinner! I’ll be finished with training by then. Can’t wait to see you.

By December, this had evolved into something more personal:

Alexander: Just landed. Brain still in Monaco, heart already in Houston.

Gemma: My heart’s navigator is better than your brain’s apparently. It knows exactly where you are, my pony boy.

There’s a lightness to their exchanges that stands in stark contrast to Alexander’s typically measured communication style. Their messages are filled with inside jokes, references to shared experiences, and surprisingly playful banter:

Gemma: The girls asked why I kept smiling during their strength training session today. Told them I was reviewing Olympic routines in my head. Didn’t mention I was actually remembering you trying to do that Shrek impression.

Alexander: What “trying”? I nailed it. I’m even typing this in his voice!

Unlike the composed Ferrari driver who addressed the media in his professional Italian, each word chosen with deliberate precision, Alexander’s language with Gemma occasionally dissolved into something more intimate. In these unguarded moments, Italian phrases would emerge unbidden, as if certain emotions could only find their voice in his adopted tongue. These rare glimpses of this personal, rather than professional “Italian Alexander” persona, revealed a man who had found in his second language a freedom of expression that his mother tongue, bound as it was to childhood loss and English reserve, could never quite permit. With Gemma, the boundaries between his compartmentalised linguistic selves began, almost imperceptibly, to blur.

The public record of their relationship remained minimal. Alexander’s preference for privacy ensuring they were rarely photographed together. One exception was an LSU women’s gymnastics meet in January 2024, where they were captured in the stands supporting Gemma’s alma mater. The image is striking not for its composition but for Alexander’s uncharacteristic body language. He was completely engrossed as Gemma pointed out technical elements of the routines, leaning forward with genuine curiosity, asking questions, his usual reserved demeanour replaced by open enthusiasm.

“That was the Alexander I knew privately,” Gemma reflected during our interview. “The person who would become totally absorbed in understanding something new, especially if it mattered to me. He wanted to know all the technical scoring details, the difficulty values, why certain skills were connected in sequence. So many people never got to see that side of him. The earnest student rather than the composed expert.”

Their connection clearly ran deeper than mere romantic interest. As Olympic gold medallist herself, Gemma understood the psychological terrain Alexander navigated daily. The isolation of excellence, the constant pursuit of perfection, the sacrifices required at the highest level.

“We spoke the same language,” she told me, her voice taking on the slight inflection of nostalgia. “The language of dedicating your life to something that demands everything you have. The difference was that I’d already stood at the summit he was still climbing. I knew what it felt like to achieve everything you’ve ever wanted, and then wonder what comes next.”

According to Amy, this perspective was precisely what made Gemma’s influence on Alexander so profound. “She wasn’t just someone who admired his achievements from afar. She was his peer who had already completed a journey he was still on. She could offer him something none of us could: a glimpse of what might exist beyond the singular focus that had defined his entire life.”

Their most substantial time together came during the Christmas break. According to Amy, Alexander approached this extended absence from his usual environment with uncharacteristic enthusiasm.

“He actually went out and purchased gifts for Gemma’s parents,” Amy recalled with evident amusement. “This is a man who has people to handle every aspect of his life not related to four wheels, suddenly personally shopping for a family he’d never met. He was like a university student bringing someone home for the first time.”

The training data from this period shows the only complete break in Alexander’s regimen since joining Formula 1. Seven consecutive days without structured exercise or data collection, something Adamo described as “previously unthinkable.”

“When he returned,” Adamo noted, “I expected regression in his fitness markers. But, he was more centred, more present. Something fundamental had shifted.”

On a particularly cold evening during that holiday, while the Rhodes family had retired early, Alexander and Gemma stayed up talking by the fireplace. It was then, according to Gemma, that she first broached the subject of his compartmentalisation.

“As athletes, we both developed ways to separate different parts of ourselves,” she explained to me. “It’s necessary when you’re performing under intense pressure. But I noticed Alexander seemed to rely on them all the time. He didn’t seem to have a way to reconnect those parts after using them. That’s how his compartments had become solid rather than temporary. Effective for functioning through loss but limiting when it comes to connecting through vulnerability.”

Alexander’s response, she recalled, was typically thoughtful. “He said something like, ‘I’m not sure I know how to be any other way. But I think I’d like to learn.’” The moment was fleeting but significant. One of the rare instances where Alexander acknowledged the limitations of the psychological architecture that had sustained him since his parents’ deaths.

This balanced interlude appears to have crested in February 2024, just before pre-season testing. A calendar entry simply labelled “G/A Future Discussion” marks what both later acknowledged was their first serious conversation about longer-term possibilities. The content of this discussion remains private, but subsequent schedule adjustments suggest plans for more integrated time together during the coming season.

“We were trying to be realistic,” Gemma told me. “But we were also allowing ourselves to imagine what might be possible if we both committed to making it work beyond the constant back-and-forth.”

Text messages following this conversation reveal a subtle but significant shift in tone:

Alexander: Il mio d’oro. Just booked Barcelona apartment. Views of old city as requested. They have a proper espresso machine!

Gemma: An actual kitchen and living room instead of another hotel? You spoil me. Can’t wait to pretend we’re normal people for a weekend. x

For this brief window, perhaps four months in total, Alexander Macalister appeared to have achieved what many considered impossible: a life containing something meaningful beyond the pursuit of racing excellence. Those closest to him noted subtle but significant changes: more spontaneous laughter, less obsessive focus on technical details, an occasional willingness to deviate from strictly optimal decisions.

It wouldn’t last, of course. But the evidence of this period challenges the perception of Alexander as someone constitutionally incapable of existing beyond the paddock. More significantly, it reveals that Gemma saw the limitations of his carefully constructed psychological framework with the clarity of someone who had navigated similar territory herself. She recognised his compartmentalisation not as a personality trait but as a survival mechanism. Oone he had perhaps outgrown, even if he didn’t yet realise it.

For a time, at least, he glimpsed another possibility, guided by someone who had already completed the journey he was still undertaking. Both in sport and in the integration of achievement with a complete life beyond it.

---

THE SHIFTING FOCUS (2024)

The first indication of change appears in the Ferrari factory logs from March 2024. As pre-season testing data suggested the SF-24 might genuinely challenge Red Bull’s dominance, Alexander’s presence in Maranello increased substantially. The simulator usage records show a striking pattern: his already substantial hours nearly doubled between February and April.

“He started staying after scheduled sessions,” Ricci Adami told me as we reviewed these logs in his office. “One night in March, after seven hours in the simulator, he called the aerodynamics team back in because he’d identified something in the car’s behaviour through the high-speed turn-in. We ended up working until 3 AM redesigning a floor component.”

The shifting focus wasn’t immediately obvious to anyone besides those closest to Alexander. His calendar still contained those blocked periods labelled for Gemma, but factory team members began noticing changes in his availability and engagement.

“There was this gradual evolution,” explained Marco Bettini, Alexander’s data engineer. “At first, he was strict about leaving when scheduled. Then he started asking us to call him during those periods if anything significant emerged from the data. By May, he was joining technical meetings remotely from his laptop while supposedly on personal time.”

Telemetry archives reveal Alexander requesting unprecedented amounts of data during this period. His detailed notes on competitors’ performance, always thorough, became almost obsessive. One particularly revealing document from after the Australian Grand Prix contains twenty-seven pages of handwritten analysis comparing Verstappen’s sector times with his own, breaking down differences to hundredths of a second.

“The possibility of a genuine championship began crystallising after his win in Japan,” Fred Vasseur acknowledged. “We could see it in the data, and Alexander could feel it in the car. When that happens to a driver, when they sense this might be their moment, something fundamental shifts.”

As Ferrari’s performance improved, multiple team members observed Alexander spending more time debriefing with engineers, extending technical meetings, and requesting additional simulator sessions. The factory security logs show him arriving earlier and leaving later, sometimes spending sixteen-hour days immersed in development.

These changes coincided with a marked decrease in transatlantic flights. Alexander’s meticulously maintained calendar shows the “G time” blocks gradually compressed, then occasionally rescheduled, then sometimes cancelled altogether.

“He was still there physically, but his mind was increasingly elsewhere,” Gemma told me with remarkable candour during our interview in Austin. “I’d catch him staring into space, running races in his head. Sometimes mid-conversation, he’d suddenly say something like, ‘I think we need more rear wing at Monaco’ as if continuing a completely different discussion.”

She continued: “You know what’s funny? I recognised that look immediately. It’s the same one I’d have before big competitions. What my coach called the ‘thousand-yard gymnast stare.’ I’d be physically present, but mentally mapping out every fraction of a balance beam routine.”

She described a particular moment after the Chinese Grand Prix, which Alexander had won convincingly: “He flew to Houston directly afterward, and I thought we’d be celebrating. Instead, he spent most of the first evening on video calls with engineers, discussing setup options for the next race. When I brought him a coffee during one call, he absently called me something sweet sounding in Italian and squeezed my hand. A brief acknowledgment before diving back into downforce calculations.”

Unlike many partners who might have resented this division of attention, Gemma approached it with the perspective and wisdom of someone who had walked this same path before.

The mixed emotions in her voice were evident even months later. “The cruel irony was that I understood completely. If anyone could grasp what that moment meant to him, it was me. I’d have done exactly the same if Olympic qualification was suddenly within reach.”

Amy Millie, typically protective of Alexander, offered measured confirmation of this shift when I spoke with her in Milan.

“There was a recalibration of priorities happening,” she acknowledged carefully. “Not a deliberate choice to devalue one thing for another, but the natural consequence of sensing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity approaching. I tried to help him maintain some balance, but…”

She trailed off, then continued with characteristic frankness: “Look, Alexander had been working toward this moment his entire life. Since before his father died. The prospect of finally achieving it created a gravitational pull that was almost impossible to resist.”

The Ferrari performance data tells its own story. As the car’s competitiveness improved the documentation of Alexander’s personal travel diminishes proportionally. By June, what had once been regular transatlantic journeys had reduced to occasional video calls.

“It wasn’t a sudden break,” Gemma emphasised. “There was no dramatic moment, no ultimatum. Just this gradual shift where racing expanded to fill more and more space in his life. The way water naturally flows to fill every available gap.”

She leaned forward, her expression thoughtful. “I’d been through something similar after my injury, when I was fighting for my Olympic comeback. That single-minded focus when you sense something extraordinary is within reach… I’d experienced it myself. The difference was I wasn’t trying to be in love with anything other than gymnastics. As a couple finding their way, we had to reconcile that my greatest achievements were behind me, while Alexander’s were still ahead.”

The results from this period reveal Alexander extracting increasingly impressive performance from the Ferrari. Finding time in corners where teammates couldn’t, managing tyres with unprecedented precision. As his professional focus intensified, his private life contracted accordingly.

“I remember actually being proud of him,” Gemma said, her expression complex. “Watching him win, seeing the Ferrari finally matching the Red Bull… I knew what it cost him, what it meant to him. I was genuinely happy for him, even as I recognised what it meant for us.”

By mid-season, with Ferrari and Red Bull in an increasingly tight championship battle, Alexander’s communication patterns had fundamentally altered. Text messages that had once flowed freely became briefer, more sporadic. According to Claudia, his tendency to work late into the night returned with increased intensity.

“He wasn’t trying to pull away,” Amy insisted. “He was trying to do both: maintain the relationship while seizing a championship opportunity. But there are only so many hours in a day, only so much mental bandwidth available. Something had to give.”

The correlation between improving Ferrari performance and the changing relationship dynamic is starkly visible when mapped together. A professional ascent mirrored by a personal retreat. Not a conscious choice, perhaps, but an inevitable consequence of the singular focus required to compete at the highest level of motorsport.

“In some ways,” Gemma reflected, “we were victims of his success. If the car had remained uncompetitive, we might have had more time together. But who would wish that on someone they care about?”

---

The Canadian Inflection

Watching the Canadian Grand Prix unfold on the training centre’s television, Gemma felt the familiar flutter of anxiety she always experienced seeing Alexander race in the rain. The conditions at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve had deteriorated throughout the afternoon, transforming the track into a treacherous mirror reflecting leaden skies. Around her, fellow gymnasts and coaches had gathered in the break room, drawn by her connection to the championship leader currently dominating the race.

“He’s in complete control,” one of her teammates commented, impressed by the twelve-second gap Alexander had methodically built over Verstappen.

“Looking at his lines through that chicane,” the commentator had said, “he’s finding consistent grip where no one else can.” She leaned forward, analysing his technique with the precision of someone who understood physical performance at the highest level. “Alexander told me rain simplifies things for him. It’s just him, the car, and feeling it out.”

When it happened, it happened quickly. The blue flags waving for Lance Stroll’s Aston Martin. The momentary confusion as both cars disappeared into a cloud of spray. Then the sickening sight of Alexander’s Ferrari sliding sideways across saturated grass before impacting the barrier with a violence that made the assembled group gasp.

“My stomach dropped,” Gemma would later tell me, her Texan accent becoming slightly more pronounced as she recalled the emotional moment. “It was the first time I’d seen him in a violent accident while we were together. The way his helmet bounced inside the cockpit…” She stopped, the memory still visceral months later. “I knew the cars were safe, but in that moment, all the statistics about survival cells and impact absorption disappeared. I just saw the person I cared about being thrown around like a rag doll.”

Her fingers had instinctively reached for her phone, typing a message even before the Ferrari had come to a complete stop: Are you okay? Please let me know you’re alright when you can.

The wait for a response felt eternal. The cameras showed Alexander climbing from the car, giving the mandatory thumbs-up to the medical team, but his movements seemed stilted, mechanical to her trained eye. The subtle indicators of injury that as a lifelong gymnast, she knew only too well.

“I could see it in his gait,” she explained, her eyes narrowing with the focus of someone accustomed to reading bodies for signs of trauma. “Athletes learn to mask pain, to push through it. I’ve competed with hairline fractures, torn ligaments. You develop this autopilot that gets you through the moment. I was seeing Alexander’s autopilot.”

The TV broadcast produced a graphic showing his championship lead evaporating in real time as Verstappen continued circulating, extending his advantage with each completed lap. Twenty-five points vanishing into the Canadian mist.

“I couldn’t reach him,” Gemma recalled. “Not immediately after, not during what would have been the team debrief, not even hours later. I understood he’d be busy. There would be medical checks, team meetings, media obligations… but there had always been those quick moments before, a text between commitments, just to connect.”

The delay itself wasn’t entirely unexpected. She had experienced Alexander’s race-day focus before. But this was different. This wasn’t just focus; this was complete disconnection at a moment when connection would have seemed most natural.

That evening in her Houston apartment, Gemma checked in with the WhatsApp group chat she’d been added to months earlier. A courtesy from Claudia that had made her feel genuinely included in Alexander’s world. The messages were flowing rapidly between team members, but they were entirely operational: recovery protocols, revised schedules, media strategy. No mention of how Alexander was actually feeling, or even confirmation he was physically unharmed beyond the official carefully worded statement.

It struck her then how the team operated like a perfectly calibrated machine activating its crisis protocols, each component performing its designated function with mechanical precision. In those messages, she glimpsed the Ferrari world from the inside, and at that moment, Alexander’s partner was an outsider. Not someone critical to performance.

Unlike many people watching from outside, Gemma understood the cocoon that forms around an elite athlete after disappointment or injury. She’d experienced it herself after her ankle injury in 2017. The team’s protective instincts, the medical staff’s primacy, the carefully managed external communication. But understanding didn’t make the distance any easier to bear.

Watching the chat scroll past on her screen, Gemma felt a curious sense of displacement. Present yet peripheral, connected yet separate. She’d been welcomed into Alexander’s life, but there remained this parallel universe of his racing existence that operated according to different laws, with different priorities.

Her phone remained silent as hours passed. The texts she sent, first concerned, then reassuring, finally just a simple “Thinking of you”, sat delivered but unread.

“After certain moments, Alexander has always retreated into what I call his ‘racing mind,’” Amy would later explain to me during our interview in Milan, reluctance evident in her measured tone. “It’s not personal. He’s not shutting people out deliberately. The racing simply expands until it fills all available space.”

This expansion, this gravitational pull of the championship, had been gradually altering their relationship’s orbit for weeks. The Canadian crash merely accelerated what was already in motion.

When Alexander finally called late that night, the conversation was brief, almost perfunctory. He sounded exhausted but focused, apologising for not responding sooner but doing so with the politeness one excuses their arriving late for a dental appointment.

“When he finally called, he had no idea anything was wrong between us,” Gemma told me, her expression a complex mixture of understanding and resignation. “He was entirely focused on the technical response, the points implications, the adjustments needed for the next race. It wasn’t that he didn’t care; it’s that he genuinely couldn’t comprehend there might be an emotional dimension that required attention.”

She tugged absently at a strand of hair, a movement which seemed to suggest the processing of complex emotions. “I wasn’t angry he hadn’t called me earlier, or couldn’t call me earlier. I was hurt that it didn’t seem to bother him, that he didn’t recognise what it was like for me in all that waiting.”

The contrast was telling. Gemma had been processing the emotional weight of seeing someone she cared about in potential danger. Their perspectives had diverged in that moment more dramatically than ever before.

As they spoke, Gemma found herself listening not just to his words but to the subtext beneath them. The way his voice quickened when discussing the technical aspects of recovery, the subtle shift in tone when mentioning the championship standings. His mind was already racing ahead to Barcelona, to recovery protocols, to the long game of the season.

What hurt was the unintentional nature of the distance opening between them. Alexander wasn’t choosing racing over her; the racing was simply consuming him, a process as natural and inevitable as gravity.

“That’s when I first truly understood this about him,” Gemma reflected, her voice steady with the clarity of someone who had processed difficult truths. “His capacity to shut out everything. Even important things, even people who mattered wasn’t really a deliberate choice he was making. It was simply how he was wired when racing took precedence.”

The technical memo dated that evening which I later viewed during my factory research revealed Alexander’s extensive input into recovery strategy, detailed notes on simulator adjustments, physical therapy priorities, even specific setup changes to address Barcelona’s unique characteristics. His mind had clearly been completely absorbed in this work during the hours Gemma had been waiting to hear from him.

Their call ended with the usual affection but a new undercurrent of awareness, at least on Gemma’s part. Something fundamental had shifted, not through conflict or diminished feelings, but through the simple reality of two lives with increasingly divergent gravitational pulls.

A brief text exchange followed the next day:

Gemma: I’m so glad you’re okay. I was worried.

Alexander: I’m fine. I am a bit sore but nothing serious.

Gemma: I miss you.

Alexander: I miss you too, d’oro. Will call properly soon, promise. Just need to get through the next few days.

Those “next few days” would stretch into weeks as the championship battle intensified. Each subsequent conversation felt slightly more distant, slightly more constrained by the realities of their separate worlds.

“Looking back, Canada was the first unmissable signal,” Gemma told me. “I saw firsthand how championship pressure transformed his priorities. Transformed him. The pattern was familiar to me. I’d lived it myself during my Olympic years. Seen friends and competitors make similar transformations.”

She paused, considering. “The difference was, I was in this relationship having completed that journey. I’d stood on the podium, felt the weight of gold medals, and come out the other side. Alexander was still in pursuit of his defining achievement, and nothing could or should divert that focus. Not even us.”

Gemma traced a small pattern on the table between us. “When I was fighting for my comeback before Tokyo, I was twenty-two. Still just a kid, really. Single, living in the Olympic bubble. I didn’t have to choose between that dream and loving someone. That’s what made this so complicated. I understood exactly why he needed that focus. I respected it, even admired it. But understanding doesn’t automatically create a solution.”

She looked up, her expression revealing both wisdom and lingering questions. “How do you honour someone’s necessary journey while also honouring what you need in a relationship? That’s the question I couldn’t answer.”

The race marked the beginning of an eight-race stretch without victory for Alexander, increasing championship pressure with each passing weekend. Claudia’s calendar, which she later showed me during our interview, told the story visually. Alexander’s schedule after Canada changed dramatically. Personal time blocks began disappearing, replaced with engineering meetings, simulator sessions, physical preparation. The space in his life that might have accommodated relationship maintenance was systematically compressed by championship necessity.

“The irony was that I would have been the perfect person to help him through that moment,” Gemma said, a wistful smile briefly crossing her face. “Instead, the moment itself created the distance that would eventually separate us.”

I noted during our conversation that Gemma hadn’t been at the Canadian Grand Prix despite its relative proximity to her training base in Texas. A small but telling detail that suggested their competing priorities had already begun creating distance before the crash itself. She nodded, her eyes reflecting both understanding and resignation.

“We both made choices that prioritised our professional commitments”, she confirmed. Neither of us was wrong to do so, but each choice reinforced the fundamental challenge we were facing.”

In the months following Canada, their relationship continued, but with a gradually increasing awareness of its inevitable conclusion. Not through dramatic confrontation or diminished affection, but through the simple reality of two lives moving in different directions, pulled by different gravitational forces.

The Canadian crash hadn’t caused their eventual separation. It had merely illuminated what was already true: that Alexander’s championship pursuit wasn’t just his career but his fundamental nature, and that when racing truly mattered, it consumed him completely. Not by choice, but by design.

“I used to think relationships were primarily about feelings,” Gemma reflected in our final conversation about this period. “But with Alexander, I learned they’re equally about orbits. About whether two separate trajectories can find sustainable alignment or are destined to diverge.”

She smiled. “The truth is, I recognised what was happening before he did. Not because I’m more emotionally aware, but because I’d already completed the journey he was still on. I knew what it took to reach that summit, and I respected it too much to become an obstacle.”

The divergence, when it finally came, would be as measured and considerate as everything else in Alexander’s approach to life. But its seeds were planted in those rain-soaked moments in Canada, when twenty-five championship points disappeared into the mist, and with them, the delicate balance that had temporarily aligned two extraordinary, but ultimately separate, worlds.

---

THE NECESSARY ENDING (Summer 2024)

There is a particular cruelty to endings that nobody wants but everyone understands. The mutual decision between Alexander and Gemma in July 2024 was precisely that. A reluctant recognition of incompatible realities rather than any failure of feeling.

“I keep going back to this one perfect morning in Maranello,” Alexander told me during one of our late night conversations, his guard momentarily lowered. “Mid April, just after Japan. Neither of us had commitments, so no alarms. The sun was coming through my bedroom window in these perfect slants. Gemma was reading something on her iPad, laughing occasionally. Enzo was asleep at the foot of the bed.”

His description was uncharacteristically detailed, as if he’d preserved the scene in amber: “We didn’t have any plans. The whole day stretched out empty. We talked about walking far up in the hills later, maybe stopping at this little caffè she liked. Just… existing together without purpose. I remember thinking how strange and wonderful it felt to have nothing I needed to do.”

This rare moment of unstructured time represented an exception rather than the rule. By June, with Alexander increasing championship contention, such moments had become increasingly scarce.

The seeds of their separation were planted during a difficult weekend in Montreal in early June. Ironically, the city where they’d once planned to spend extended time together. In late June, Gemma travelled from America to Austria to see Alexander during a race weekend rather than, as usual, before or after. With the Paris Olympics starting in just a few weeks, Gemma was trying to maximise whatever time she could with Alexander. Text messages between them from this period, which both permitted me to view, reveal the growing tension:

Gemma: Just landed at Vienna International. Still meeting for dinner tonight?

Alexander: Engineering meeting running long. Can we push to 21:30?

Gemma: Could you try to finish earlier? I’m exhausted and I really want to have some time with you before I collapse.

Alexander: I’ll try. Something critical with the floor. Sorry.

Three hours later:

Alexander: Still at the track. Don’t wait up. Will make it up to you tomorrow, d’oro.

According to Gemma, this pattern had become increasingly common. “It wasn’t that he was deliberately choosing racing over me,” she explained during our interview in Austin. “It was that racing had become so all-consuming that everything else naturally fell away. When championship points are at stake, you can’t exactly say, ‘Sorry, I need to leave this crucial meeting to have dinner with my girlfriend.’”

She added with a wry smile, “And trust me, honey, I’ve seen this movie before. Every Olympic cycle, relationships throughout the team would start fracturing 1-2 months out from the Games. Competing at these levels demands a kind of selfishness that’s nearly impossible to balance with deep connection.”

The situation was complicated by Gemma’s own commitments with the US Gymnastics team. “We were both pulled in different directions,” she said. “I had my responsibilities as a technical advisor to the Olympic team, plus a burgeoning coaching career and commitments with NBC for their Olympic coverage. The difference was that my intense period would last through the Games; his championship battle might extend years.”

For Amy Millie, who witnessed this period firsthand, the situation created a painful conflict of loyalties.

“I wanted Alexander to be happy in all aspects of his life,” she told me carefully. “But I also understood what this championship opportunity meant to him. It’s the culmination of everything since he was a child. Everything he’d sacrificed for. How do you tell someone to potentially compromise that once-in-a-lifetime achievement?”

The catalyst came in early July, after the British Grand Prix. An exchange between them, described by both with remarkably similar details, took place at Alexander’s home in Maranello.

“We were supposed to have three days together,” Gemma recalled. “But Ferrari called an emergency development meeting after Red Bull brought significant upgrades to Silverstone. Alexander apologised, said he’d only be gone a few hours. He returned eleven hours later.”

What neither had anticipated was that this would be the moment of clarity rather than conflict. “It wasn’t Alexander who first articulated what was becoming increasingly clear to both of us,” Gemma told me. “I had spent my entire athletic career learning to recognise when something wasn’t working. When a routine sequence needed to be modified, when recovery demanded precedence over training. That same intuition told me our timing was wrong, despite our feelings being right.”

According to Alexander, the conversation that followed was difficult but necessary: “Gemma wasn’t angry. That would have been easier to deal with. She was just… sad. She looked at me with this profound understanding and said, ‘I think we need to be honest about where we are and where we’re headed, Pony Boy.’”

Her use of the nickname carried particular weight in that moment. It was a playful reference to the Ferrari prancing horse that adorned Alexander’s clothing, one that had become their private term of affection.

What followed was a painful but remarkably mature assessment of their situation. Both acknowledged the championship fight required Alexander’s complete focus, while Gemma’s commitments demanded their own dedication. Both recognised the current arrangement, the snatched moments between competing obligations, was serving neither of them well.

“The most difficult part,” Alexander admitted during one of our discussions at his home, “was that there was no villain, no clear mistake to fix. Just two people with incompatible life paths who genuinely cared for each other.”

Amy provided additional context: “I remember Alexander calling me afterward. He wasn’t looking for advice or consolation. He just needed to articulate what had happened. He said, ‘It’s the right decision for both of us. I just wish right didn’t have to hurt so much.’”

The contrast between this difficult conversation and the idyllic morning Alexander had described earlier was not lost on him. During a rare day off in September when I observed he filled his “free” time with simulator analysis and a voluntary fitness session he made a revealing comment to Amy while I was present:

“Remember that morning in April I told you about? With Gemma? When we had absolutely nothing scheduled?”

Amy nodded, and Alexander continued, staring at his densely packed calendar: “I think about that sometimes. Just… existing without purpose.” He paused, his fingers absently tracing the edge of his tablet. “She had this way of pulling me into the present moment. No analysis of what happened yesterday, no preparation for tomorrow. Just… now.”

He looked up at Amy with a rueful half-smile. “I wonder if I’ll ever learn how to do that properly without her there to anchor me.”

The observation carried no self-pity. Merely a recognition of the path he had chosen and its inevitable consequences.

For her part, Gemma described their parting with remarkable grace: “We both ultimately wanted the same thing for each other. The freedom to pursue excellence without compromise or resentment. Sometimes love looks like letting go when holding on would diminish both people.”

Their last night together had its own poignancy. According to Gemma, they sat on Alexander’s terrace until nearly dawn, “talking about everything except what was happening.”

Alexander’s recollection was more sparse: “We didn’t cry or fight or make grand declarations. We just… were together, one last time. Then in the morning, I drove her to the airport, and that was it.”

In the months that followed, Alexander directed his complete focus toward the championship battle, entering the most intense phase of competition from September through November. By this time, the Paris Olympics had concluded in mid-August, and Gemma’s intensive work with the US team had wound down. While Alexander described their separation as a mutual recognition of competing priorities, the timeline reveals an interesting asymmetry. His championship campaign accelerated just as her professional obligations entered a quieter period.

During my visit to her family’s lake house in October, I noticed Gemma’s calendar on the kitchen wall marked with surprisingly few commitments for the remainder of 2024. When I mentioned Alexander’s upcoming races, she smiled slightly before changing the subject.

“On paper, we could have made it work, probably,” she admitted later that evening as we sat on the veranda. “But that wasn’t the point. I’ve been on the other side of this equation. Where nothing can exist except the goal… He needed to be completely immersed in the championship battle without any guilt or division of focus. And I cared about him too much to be the thing that pulled him in another direction, even slightly.”

---

THE CONCLUSION

The final scene of any relationship rarely feels conclusive to those living through it. One moment a person is integrated into your daily existence; the next they are not. The mind struggles to process such transitions, even when rationally understood.

Alexander’s home in Maranello contains subtle evidence of this particular ending. During my first visit there, months after the events described, I noticed several items that seemed at odds with the space’s otherwise minimalist aesthetic: a small collection of books on one shelf (titles including “The 5 Love Languages” and “Too Far Apart: Making Long-Distance Work”), a framed photograph of Gemma, present but tucked behind two other photos of Enzo and Alexander’s team on his desk, and a small blue ceramic mug that appeared to stand out amid his otherwise meticulously organised kitchen.

When he noticed me looking at one of these objects, Alexander simply said, “Some things I haven’t quite sorted out yet.” It was the closest he came to acknowledging the lingering echoes of Gemma’s presence in his living space.

Amy Millie, who witnessed the immediate aftermath of their separation more closely than anyone, described Alexander’s response with characteristic precision.

“I’ve seen him process many losses throughout his life,” she told me carefully. “This one was different. He acknowledged it hurt while simultaneously moving forward. There was no denial, no attempt to pretend it didn’t matter. Just this quiet acceptance paired with absolute focus on what came next.”

According to Amy, Alexander returned from the airport after seeing Gemma off and immediately called Ferrari’s head of strategy. “He wanted to review race simulations for Hungary literally hours after saying goodbye to someone who clearly mattered deeply to him. That’s Alexander. Compartmentalisation isn’t a choice for him; it’s survival.”

This ability to separate personal pain from professional purpose had been cultivated since childhood. A necessary adaptation to extraordinary loss. Yet in one rare moment of candour during our conversations at his home in Maranello, Alexander revealed the limitations of this carefully constructed mechanism.

“The strangest part,” he said quietly, staring out at the garden where Enzo was chasing shadows, “was the contradictory impulses. I knew we were making the right decision, and I still wanted to miss the exit for the airport. At every light along the way, I just wanted to do a u-turn and go home with her. Both feelings existed simultaneously. Complete certainty we were doing the right thing, and this irrational desire to stop it from happening.”

He shook his head slightly. “I’ve never experienced that before, that level of cognitive dissonance. Usually I make a decision and commit entirely.”

This admission, offered unprompted during an otherwise technical and dry discussion, provided a glimpse into the emotional complexity belied by his composed exterior.

What followed their separation was precisely what had necessitated it: Alexander’s complete immersion in the championship battle. Factory records show him arriving earlier and staying later, simulator hours increasing substantially, fitness sessions intensifying under Adamo’s supervision.

“There was this… crystallisation of purpose,” Fred Vasseur observed. “Always focused, always professional. But now with an additional edge of determination. Like someone who had removed all distractions and was seeing the target with absolute clarity.”

The performance data confirms this assessment. Alexander’s qualifying and race pace in the second half of the season showed marked improvement, even accounting for car development. His technical feedback became more precise, his strategic input more nuanced.

“He channelled everything into the racing,” Amy explained. “Not in an unhealthy way. He wasn’t using it to escape the emotions. He was simply redirecting all available energy toward the singular goal that remained.”

Alexander’s performance from the Hungarian Grand Prix, his first race after the separation, showed a driver performing at the absolute peak of his abilities. The press conference transcript from that weekend contains a revealing exchange:

Journalist: Alexander, that was an incredible qualifying lap. What’s changed since Silverstone?

Alexander: Better understanding of the car, continued development. The team’s doing an amazing job.

Journalist: Nothing else? You seem particularly focused this weekend.

Alexander: Just concentrating on what matters right now.

That final phrase, “what matters right now”, perhaps best encapsulates Alexander’s response to the conclusion of his relationship with Gemma. Not a denial of its importance, but a deliberate narrowing of focus to what remained within his control.

For her part, Gemma moved forward with equal purpose. The timing of their separation coincided precisely with her Olympic commitments. She flew directly from Italy to Paris, where she would spend the next three weeks as part of Team USA’s coaching staff. “The Olympics were the perfect distraction,” she told me. “Sixteen-hour days supporting our athletes left little time for dwelling on personal matters. And honestly, there’s something healing about helping others achieve their dreams when your own life… feels unsettled.” Her presence on the sidelines, offering technical guidance and emotional support to younger gymnasts, became one of the quiet storylines of the Games, with several medallists crediting her influence in their success.

Their public silence about the relationship and its end was consistent with how they had conducted it throughout: with dignity and privacy. Neither has ever spoken negatively about the other in any forum.

“They were both just remarkably mature about it,” Amy reflected. “No drama, no public statement needed. Just two adults who recognised that timing is as important as connection.”

In the immediate aftermath, there was only forward momentum: Alexander driving with newfound intensity toward his championship dream, and Gemma redirecting her focus to her advisory role with the Olympic team and her developing coaching career. Two parallel paths that had briefly, beautifully converged before continuing toward their separate destinations.

“He sent this ridiculous bouquet to the training centre when the team I was coaching qualified for the 2025 World Championships,” Gemma recalls with genuine warmth. “So massive we had to distribute flowers to every office in the building. The girls were over the moon that a Formula 1 champion had acknowledged their achievement.” She pauses, then adds with a small smile, “The card just said ‘Well done, il mio d’oro’ and they all thought it was Italian for ‘good luck.’ I never corrected them.”

When the US Grand Prix approached that October, she sent him a message wishing him luck at COTA. “I told him I was disappointed to miss his return to Texas but had a competition overseas,” she shares. “I asked if he planned to impress any other gymnasts with hot laps this year. He wrote back that he was never trying to impress, only to connect.”

These small exchanges, brief, supportive, warm, maintained a thread between them even as their lives continued on separate trajectories.

What Alexander never mentioned, but Amy later revealed, was the note he discovered the evening after Gemma’s departure. While reviewing his race notes for Hungary, he found a folded slip of paper tucked between pages of technical analysis that hadn’t been there before. In Gemma’s distinctive handwriting were just four words: “Trust what you know.” She must have slipped it into his journal during their final morning together in Maranello, a parting message he wasn’t meant to find until after she’d gone.

According to Amy, Alexander kept the note tucked securely into the lining of his race helmet for every remaining Grand Prix of the 2024 season.

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THE 2024 HELMET

While analysing Alexander’s 2024 season in hindsight, I became intrigued by his choice for his annual special helmet design. Unlike many drivers who change their liveries frequently, Alexander had established a deliberate tradition of selecting just one race each year for a meaningful deviation from his pearl white base design. Each representing something of profound personal significance.

His previous choices had been revealing: Modena’s yellow and blue for his first race in red at Monza in 2021; the “Alonso Blue” tribute to his childhood hero at Barcelona in 2022; and the poignant homage to his parents at Silverstone 2023. These weren’t marketing exercises but carefully considered expressions of Alexander’s values and connections.

This made his selection of the United States Grand Prix for his 2024 design all the more significant. The helmet, revealed during Thursday’s media sessions at Circuit of the Americas, featured subdued hues of burnt orange, russet and cream that evoked the Texas landscape at dusk. The design incorporated thoughtful details: windmills, a silhouette of a ranch hand on horseback, barbed wire fencing, and distant cattle grazing on rolling hills. A small Lone Star adorned the rear, accompanied by the phrase “Salt of the Earth” in unassuming typography.

When questioned by the assembled press, Alexander offered only a measured explanation: “Texas represents something authentic to me. Not the Hollywood version, but the genuine article. Hard-working people connected to the land, doing what needs doing without fanfare. There’s a quiet dignity there that resonates with me.”

What went unreported, and what only became clear to me through my knowledge of Alexander’s life outside of the headlines, was the deeper significance behind this tribute. In January 2024, Alexander had commissioned this design as a gesture of appreciation for the Rhodes family home he’d visited the previous Christmas. It was to be a surprise, revealed when they would reunite at the October race.

Despite their separation in July, Alexander proceeded with the helmet unchanged. Amy confirmed this wasn’t mere coincidence: “He never wavered on using that design after things ended with Gemma. That tells you something about how much that experience meant to him.”

Amy, when I mentioned the helmet during our conversation in Monaco, smiled knowingly: “He never said it directly, but we all knew. It was his way of acknowledging something he’d recognised in her family. That profound connection to place. The Rhodes have this relationship with their land that goes beyond ownership; it’s identity, continuity, belonging. In many ways, it’s how Alexander feels about Italy now. A chosen homeland where he found his own roots.”

The helmet received little attention in the broader narrative of Alexander’s championship season. Alongside more dramatic storylines, his battle with Verstappen, Ferrari’s resurgence, the looming championship showdown, this quiet tribute passed largely unremarked upon by the motorsport press.

Yet for those few who understood its genesis, the Austin helmet represented something profound: Alexander’s capacity for appreciation transcending the relationship’s end, his willingness to honour a meaningful connection despite its conclusion, and perhaps most tellingly, his ability to compartmentalise without completely disconnecting.

Gemma never publicly acknowledged the helmet, but when I asked her about it during our conversation in Austin, a small smile played across her lips. “That’s just like him,” she said softly. “Keeping his word on something personal, even when circumstances changed.” She paused before adding, “My father noticed immediately. Called me that Thursday night to ask if I’d seen it. Said it looked just like the view from our west pasture at sunset.”

This seemingly minor detail, one helmet design amid a championship season of dramatic finishes and brilliant headlines, offers perhaps the most nuanced insight into Alexander’s character: his profound appreciation for authenticity, his loyalty to meaningful experiences, and his capacity to honour connections even as competitive pressures necessitated their reimagining.

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THE PATTERN RECOGNITION

In examining the arc of Alexander Macalister’s life, certain patterns emerge with such clarity that they become impossible to ignore. Chief among these is his response to significant personal loss. A distinctive psychological mechanism that transforms potential devastation into focused determination.

The evidence accumulated across his biography reveals a consistent trajectory: mother’s death at eleven followed by intensified focus on karting; father’s death at fourteen preceding his near-obsessive dedication to the Ferrari Academy programme; the crushing defeat at Abu Dhabi 2021 giving way to unprecedented technical engagement during the difficult 2022 season.

When I proposed this pattern to Alexander during one of our later conversations, questioning if his separation from Gemma might follow this same template, his response was more nuanced than I expected.

“I’m not sure the pattern applies here in quite the same way,” he said, studying the performance graphs I’d laid before him. These charts showed his qualifying and race pace before and after their separation. A clear inflection point visible in July 2024. “The end with Gemma wasn’t like my other… challenges. It was… a conscious choice. A difficult one, certainly, but not something that happened to me.”

He traced the performance line with his finger. “This improvement wasn’t a response to loss… it was more that the narrowing of focus created the conditions for both outcomes. The championship became all-consuming, and the relationship became… collateral damage.”

The telemetry data from the second half of the 2024 season presents an interesting picture. Alexander’s average qualifying advantage over his teammate increased by nearly two-tenths of a second after Hungary. His consistency in race trim improved markedly, with fewer fluctuations in lap time even as tyre degradation increased. His technical feedback, always precise, became almost preternaturally detailed.

“There was a noticeable shift in his approach after July,” confirmed Ricci Adami, his race engineer. “Always professional, always focused but now with this… intensity that hadn’t been there before. Like someone who had removed all restrictions and was seeing the goal with perfect clarity.”

When pressed on this observation, Amy Millie offered a more complex interpretation than I’d anticipated.

“It would be easy to see it as the same pattern,” she told me during our conversation in Milan. “Alexander responds to loss by redirecting emotional energy toward what remains within his control. But I think this situation was different. The championship focus came first. It was becoming all-encompassing and the relationship ended as a consequence, not as a catalyst.”

Her expression suggested she was choosing her words carefully. “His single-mindedness is simultaneously his greatest strength and his most significant limitation. This ability to focus with such intensity has made him exceptional, but it also creates this… gravitational pull that affects everything and everyone around him.”

The performance improvements coinciding with the period following his separation from Gemma are empirically undeniable. After July 2024, Alexander scored five race victories and three additional podiums from ten remaining races. A championship-defining run that ultimately secured his first world title.

“I wouldn’t frame it as the relationship ending helping him win the championship,” Fred Vasseur cautioned when I raised this correlation. “The car development, strategy calls, team dynamics. These factors were equally influential. What Alexander brings is this remarkable ability to extract every fraction of performance when it matters most. The second half of that season, many elements aligned simultaneously.”

What struck me most was the invisible burden this pattern placed on those in Alexander’s orbit. His championship focus didn’t simply affect him. It created a gravitational pull that distorted everything around it. Those closest to him. Amy, Adamo, Claudia, and most notably Gemma, found themselves making constant, often unacknowledged accommodations to his narrowing focus.

“The fascinating thing,” noted Dr. Emma Collins, a sports psychologist who has worked with multiple Formula 1 teams (though never directly with Alexander), “is the self-fulfilling nature of such single-mindedness. When someone believes total dedication is the only path to success, they create conditions where that becomes true. Eliminating potential counterexamples through their choices.”

When I shared this assessment with Alexander, his response was measured but revealing: “It’s true that I believed this was the only way to win that championship. I’m not sure I have the perspective, or the bravery, to see if that was the only way.”

Gemma’s perspective added another dimension entirely. As an Olympic gold medallist who had reached the pinnacle of her own sport, she understood elite performance psychology intimately.

“Alexander convinced himself that our relationship and the championship were mutually exclusive,” she explained when we spoke in Austin. “As someone who had competed at the highest level, I knew that wasn’t necessarily true. Some of my teammates performed their best while maintaining balanced lives. Others needed that monk-like focus Alexander adopted.”

Then, without a trace of resentment: “I understood his choice. I might have made the same one in his position.” The question that lingered, though, was whether he might have achieved the same results without the sacrifice.

Amy, when I circled back to this topic in a later conversation, offered a candid assessment: “We’ll never know if he could have balanced both successfully. The championship was so close that any tiny distraction might have tipped the scales. Was the absolute focus necessary? Maybe not. But it was the path he knew, the method he trusted.”

She added, with surprising vulnerability: “Although I recognise that it’s easier to support someone’s single-minded focus when you’re part of that focus rather than competing with it.”

The data suggests Alexander’s performance was exceptional throughout the entire season, with the latter half showing statistical improvements that coincided with multiple factors: car development, strategic decisions, competitor mistakes, and his own intensified focus. The simplistic narrative that sacrificing his relationship was necessary for championship success remains tempting but ultimately unprovable.

“I sent him a congratulatory text after Abu Dhabi,” Gemma told me. She smiled with a hint of wistfulness. “The irony is that his championship success validates the path he chose in his mind, even if other paths might have led to the same destination. That’s the thing about counterfactuals. You never get to test them.”

The relationship with Gemma, its conclusion, and Alexander’s response thus presents not merely another instance of his established pattern, but a more complex scenario where cause and effect are less clearly defined. Was the separation a response to championship pressure, or was the championship intensity a consequence of his singular approach to life? Did his improved performance stem from the relationship’s end, or would his remarkable talent have found expression regardless of his personal circumstances?

These questions remain unanswerable, yet the gravitational pull of Alexander’s focus, and its effect on those around him, remains one of the most telling aspects of his character. What seems certain is that in choosing his path to championship glory, Alexander reverted to the psychological mechanism that had served him through previous losses. He channelled everything towards what remained within his control, even at the cost of what might have enriched his life beyond the confines of Formula 1.