Leo chuckled and wiped his face with the towel. He looked at the "Season Opener Dominance" side quest in his vision.

[Practice: Top 3 Achieved.]

"Let them check," Leo said. "The car is fine. It’s just being driven correctly."

Leo walked toward the back of the garage to get some water. As he passed Marcus Berg, his teammate, he saw the older driver staring at the floor, his face a mask of frustration and fear. Berg had finished P15, three seconds slower than Leo.

The "Ghost" of the paddock had just become the king of the morning.

But Leo knew the real challenge was coming. Qualifying was at 17:30. The track would be cooler, the grip would be higher, and the other drivers would have had hours to study his lines.

He sat down on a flight case and closed his eyes. In the darkness, he saw the Albert Park map again. He wasn’t celebrating. He was recalculating.

’Turn 11 can be taken faster,’ he thought. ’I’m leaving half a tenth on the table at the exit of Turn 3. The simulation showed a bump at the 50-meter mark that wasn’t there today... but it will be there when the track temp drops.’

He wasn’t a rookie technician anymore. He was a machine that had just started its first proper run.

"Rossi is going to be angry in Qualifying," Elias said, coming over with a tablet. "He’s been in the stewards’ office complaining that you blocked him."

Leo didn’t even look up. "He can complain all he wants. He’s just too slow."

The afternoon heat continued to bake the circuit, but for Leo Kaito, the world was already turning cold. The "Infinite Simulation" had prepared him for the pain and the speed, but it hadn’t prepared him for the sheer satisfaction of watching the "pros" realize they were chasing a shadow.

Friday morning was over. The first box was ticked.

But the sun was still high, and the real race for survival was only just beginning.

---

The pit lane at Albert Park was a furnace. As Leo sat in the cockpit of the Arcadia number 24, the heat from the radiator behind his shoulders began to seep through his fireproof suit.

In the simulation, heat was a setting, a variable that adjusted tire wear and grip levels. Here, it was a physical weight. It made the air feel thick and the sweat itch under his balaclava.

He watched the mechanics pull the tire blankets off. The rubber was steaming, a dull black sheen that promised grip for exactly three laps before the Melbourne sun started to cook it.

"Okay, Leo," Elias’s voice crackled through the comms. "The red flag is cleared. We have twenty-two minutes left in the session. Most of the grid is out on their second runs. Rossi has just gone P1 with a 1:29.1. Let’s get some representative data."

Leo clicked the car into gear. "Copy. Going out."

He rolled down the pit lane, the engine’s anti-stall map making the car chug and jerk. It was a primitive sensation compared to the smooth digital transitions of Simex. As he crossed the pit exit line and floored the throttle, he felt the framework in his mind calibrate.

[Reaction Speed: SSS.

Racing Instinct: 9.1%.]

He could go faster. He knew exactly where the limit was. He could see the "flow-lines" of the air over the car ahead of him, the Slipstream Prediction skill painting faint trails of turbulence in his vision. He could feel the exact vibration in the steering column that signaled the front-left tire was about to slip.

But he didn’t go faster.

As he approached Turn 1, the heavy braking zone at the end of the start-finish straight, Leo made a conscious choice. He didn’t brake at the 100-meter board where his logic told him the maximum friction lived. Instead, he waited until the 90-meter mark and then stood on the pedal with slightly too much force.

The front-right tire locked up instantly. A plume of blue smoke erupted from the wheel well, the smell of burning rubber filling the cockpit. The car shuddered, the steering wheel kicking in his hands as the tire developed a flat spot.

"Lock-up, Turn 1," Leo reported, his voice intentionally strained as if he were fighting the car. He missed the apex by a meter, running wide onto the dusty part of the track.

"Careful, Leo," Elias said, his voice sounding concerned. "Telemetry shows a massive spike in brake pressure. Try to be smoother on the initial bite. The track is still green."

Leo didn’t respond. He took a mental note of the smoke. It looked good. It looked like a rookie trying too hard.

He moved into the fast chicane of Turns 9 and 10. This was a section that required a perfect balance of aero and mechanical grip. Leo intentionally turned in a fraction of a second too early. The car caught the high inside kerb, the suspension loading up violently. The rear of the car stepped out, a snap-oversteer that forced him to saw at the wheel to keep it from spinning.

"Understeer on entry, snap on exit," Leo lied over the radio. "The balance feels off. It’s nervous through the high-speed stuff."

"Copy that. Check your tire temps. You might have overheated the rears with that slide."

Leo glanced at the timing screen on his steering wheel.

[P14. 1:31.4.]

He was three seconds off Rossi’s pace. On the big screens around the track, the cameras lingered on the Arcadia car as it wobbled through the turns.

In the media center overlooking the pit lane, the commentators were already digging in.

"And there’s the Arcadia rookie, Leo Kaito," a British voice boomed over the speakers. "He had a decent installation lap, but he seems to be struggling now that the pace is picking up. That was a nasty lock-up into Turn 1, and the car looks very unsettled through the chicane. It’s a steep learning curve for a man who spent his life behind a laptop."