Amy James’ Crash Test is an angsty and emotional story set in the world of motor racing that features two young drivers – one a contender for the Formula 1 world championship, the other driving in Formula 2 – whose lives are upended, in very different ways, by a horrific on-track accident. A serious or life-threatening situation that sends one half of a (usually closeted or secret) couple rushing to the bedside of the other that then results in their both realising that life is short, they want to be together, and they need to tell the truth about their relationship is a frequently used trope in m/m sports romance. In the books I’ve read that have used it, the accident usually happens near the end – but the author turns that convention on its head here, using it as the starting point for her story and then following the characters through what happens next with its attendant mess of complex emotions and life-changing revelations.

Formula 1 star Travis Keeping doesn’t immediately hear about the F2 crash on the Circuit Paul Ricard because he’s been in a post-qualifying press conference, but he quickly realises something is wrong when the big screens that should have been showing the race are blank, the pits are almost empty and the whole track is eerily silent. There was a terrible crash involving several F2 cars that has killed two drivers and seriously injured three others, who have all been airlifted to hospital. Desperate for more information, Travis approaches some of his crew, and finds out that one of the drivers is Jacob Nichols – with whom Travis has been in a secret relationship for almost a year. Travis is a mess. He feels sick, he can’t breathe, he can’t move, but everything in him is screaming that he needs to get to the hospital. It doesn’t matter if someone guesses why he’s there, not any more. It might be his last chance to see Jacob alive.

When Travis arrives, he manages to find out that Jacob is in the ICU (having answered “yes” when asked if he’s a relative) and heads up there to see that things are much worse than he’d imagined. One of Jacob’s legs is in a cast and hanging from some kind of pulley contraption, he’s got tubes and IVs going in and out of his body and, worst of all, he’s on a ventilator. The people sitting by the bed, who Travis knows must be Jacob’s parents and older brother, look up as he approaches, clearly disappointed when they realise he isn’t a doctor, and just as clearly about to ask him to leave, but then one of the monitors goes off and he’s edged out of the room anyway, just before the door is closed in his face.

We then jump back in time to around a year earlier to witness Travis and Jacob meeting properly for the first time. They know each other’s names of course, but that’s about it; they’ve never really interacted. Until one rainy Friday afternoon at the Austrian Grand Prix when Travis, who, like everyone else, is waiting for the rain to stop, inadvertantly walks into the middle of a TV interview. He doesn’t immediately register who the interviewee is, and when the reporter smilingly asks if Travis would join them, he hesitates for a moment – then Jacob Nicols grins at him, and Travis is toast. He’s ruthlessly pushed the part of him that is interested in guys to the tiniest corner of his mind; like most male-dominated sports, F1 isn’t particularly queer-friendly and Travis has no wish to have his private life dissected and propelled into the media spotlight. But Jacob is everything he’s never let himself want or imagine having – funny, charming, gorgeous, smart – and, it seems, interested in Travis.

Crash Test is divided into three parts. The first – which is the longest – is told from Travis’ perspective, in chapters that alternate between the present day – the crash and beyond – and the past, in a series of vignettes of the time together they manage to snatch from their packed schedules over the year leading up to the crash. The author does a fabulous job here of capturing all the intense, difficult emotions Travis is experiencing – the gut-wrenching fear of losing the one person who has ever meant something to him, his frustration at not being able to be at his bedside because nobody knows what they are to each other, and the burden of having to keep the truth of his feelings and their relationship under wraps. Travis visits the hospital daily and sometimes doesn’t even get to see Jacob, and it’s heartbreaking to watch him having to fulfil his commitments to his F1 team and to pretend nothing is wrong.

The second section follows Jacob after he’s returned home to the US to live with his parents during his recovery. It’s in the blurb, so it’s not a spoiler to say that Travis and Jacob are no longer together at this point, and here we get into Jacob’s head as he starts to face up to the long-buried insecurities and internalised homophobia that caused him to act the way he did while he and Travis were together, and how those things, together with the external pressure being exerted by his family all combined to cause him to push Travis away.

The final part of the story is told in alternating PoV chapters (although we’re not told at the beginning of each chapter whose PoV we’re in, which makes for some confusion), and unfortunately, it’s the weakest part of the novel. I desperately wanted Travis and Jacob to get a long-awaited and hard-won HEA, but while they do get it, it comes too fast and too easily. After a year of silence and heartbreak, their reuinion happens at warp speed; I wanted Jacob to have to work to earn Travis’ forgiveness and trust, but Travis – who has, by now, worked through some of his own insecurities and is in a much better place – pretty much caves the minute Jacob turns up on his doorstep.

That’s what brought my final grade down a bit. Up until the end of the second section, I was reading a DIK – I loved the angstiness and intensity of it all; I liked watching Travis picking up the pieces of his life and learning to move forward, making friends and just generally reaching a place where he’s happier and more content with life and with himself; and much as I disliked Jacob for the way he treats Travis, I liked getting into his head and watching him finally admit what a shitty boyfriend he’d been, the genuine remorse for what he’d done and making plans to move forward and, hopefully, fix things with Travis. But the fixing needed more time to breathe for it to feel as though it was properly earned, and I confess it was something of an anticlimax, even though I was rooting for Travis and Jacob to get together.

One last thing. The blurb describing Crash Test as “Formula 1 meets Red, White, & Royal Blue“ is bollocks. The only similarities are the ages (mid twenties?) and nationalities (one British, one American) of the protagonists, but that’s it – and there are a number of early reviewers who were clearly pissed off when the book didn’t live up to that comparison.

Even though the ending needed more time for it to deliver the kind of emotional payoff the rest of the story deserved I’m giving Crash Test a strong recommendation – and I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for whatever Amy James writes next.