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"Fix This Then I'll Marry You" — The Female CEO Challenged A Black Mechanic

"Fix This Then I'll Marry You" — The Female CEO Challenged A Black Mechanic

Chapter 14

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The CNC machine hummed to life. Aluminum shavings curled away from the billet like silver ribbons. Forty minutes later, Yancey held the finished bushing up to the light. He turned it slowly in his fingers, feeling for any imperfection the eye couldn't catch.Then he carried it back to the Ferrari.He pressed the new bushing into the left rear mount with a hydraulic press, hand-filing the last two thousandths with a diamond file until the fit was exact: snug, no play, no rattle. He torqued the bolts to factory specification—62 foot-pounds—verified twice with a calibrated wrench.Then he started the engine.The Ferrari idled smooth, steady, clean. The ragged heartbeat was gone; the shadow frequency had vanished completely. Yancey revved past 4,000, past 5,000, past 6,000: no misfire, no hesitation. Nothing but clean, unbroken power.He was about to step back when his hand brushed the exhaust header on cylinder three. He stopped. His fingers lingered on the pipe for two seconds, then moved to cylinder four. Back to three. Four again. Three.Cylinder three's header was cooler—not by much, maybe 15°F. Imperceptible to anyone who hadn't spent fifteen years reading hot metal with bare fingertips.Yancey killed the engine, pulled the air cleaner off the carburetors. The 250 GTO ran six twin-choke Weber carburetors: twelve throats feeding twelve intake ports. He leaned in and peered into the throat feeding cylinder three.A blockage: tiny, a fragment of gasket material no bigger than a grain of rice wedged deep in the fuel jet, restricting fuel flow, creating a lean condition that would cause gradual overheating under sustained high-speed driving.Yancey fished it out with a fine steel wire, held it up to the light for every person in that room to see."This is a piece of intake manifold gasket," he said. "It broke loose during a previous repair attempt. One of your three European specialists left this fragment inside the carburetor. If this car had been driven at speed on any open road, cylinder three would have overheated within twenty minutes. The piston could have seized. At $52 million, that's not a repair bill; that's a funeral."Dead silence. Someone on the mezzanine whispered, "Oh my God."Yancey cleaned the jet, rebalanced all six carburetors by ear—adjusting each idle mixture screw in quarter-turn increments, listening for the exact point where every cylinder's exhaust note blended into one single, unified tone.Then he stepped back. He pressed the ignition one final time.
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"Fix This Then I'll Marry You" — The Female CEO Challenged A Black Mechanic

19 Part