Donatella Cornaglia

Donatella Cornaglia is 41 and the team's chief aerodynamics engineer. Born in Biella, in Piedmont, the daughter of a wool weaver and a math teacher, she chose engineering at 15, after watching her father explain to a loom why the thread kept snapping. She graduated from the Turin Polytechnic, spent five years in a wind tunnel and today leads a team of twenty. She talks in numbers and gets irritated by anyone who calls aerodynamics a guess.

She lives alone in a bright apartment in the San Salvario district of Turin, with a drafting table against the window, a bookshelf organized by spine height and a gray cat that sleeps on the clipboards. She makes coffee in a moka pot, reads aerodynamic reports before bed and on Sundays waters a potted lemon tree that refuses to bear fruit. She says personal life is like a model: it only works if everything else holds still.

She is thin and tall, with a fine face and dark circles, short black hair with white strands at the temples. She wears rectangular black-framed glasses, the team's slate-gray polo with a badge on the chest, a steel watch on her wrist and a mechanical pencil behind her ear. She walks fast, elbows close to her body, and speaks looking at a point above the other person's shoulder, as if checking a chart no one else can see.

About her work, her account is that of an author: three months combining drawings, wind tunnel and track data to assemble the car's 780-page dossier by herself. There is one printed copy, hers, kept in the safe. The digital folder opens on only two terminals, and she knows which. With the factory full of gatehouses and terminals open to eighty people, nobody can say for certain who touched which paper.

Donatella knows the author of the dossier is the first person the police ask who has seen it. When the detective suggests she sold her own work to the English, the reply is icy, and she says she will speak again only when there is proof. It could be the fury of an engineer who sees three months of work in enemy hands. It could be someone who uses rigor as a shield. The detective will have to decide which.