The installation lap ended.

Twenty-two cars crossed the start-finish line and the energy on the circuit changed instantly. The controlled, cautious pace of the sighting lap dissolved.

The engines bit harder, and throttle inputs became sharper. The Albert Park asphalt, already warm from FP1 and FP2, absorbed the sudden load of a full field pushing toward the outer edges of their performance windows.

Q1 had officially begun. 𝕗𝕣𝐞𝐞𝘄𝐞𝚋𝚗𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹.𝚌𝕠𝚖

Leo felt it through the chassis before he heard it on the radio. The cars ahead of him accelerated away with a violence that the sighting lap had suppressed. The gap in front of him opened.

He matched it — not because he was rushing, but because the tyre temperatures were still three degrees short of where he wanted them, and every smooth metre of asphalt he covered now was tyre life he would need in the final six minutes of the session.

"Fronts at 85," he said into the radio. "Rears just touched 82. Another forty seconds needed."

"Copy," Elias said. "Traffic building in Sectors 1 and 2. Prema are already on their out-lap push. Rossi’s gap to the pit exit was big. He’ll have clean air."

Leo said nothing. He already knew.

He had watched Rossi pull out of the pit lane with the unhurried authority of a man who owned the place. He showed no urgency or hesitation.

The Italian’s Prema car had rolled onto the track like it was arriving somewhere it belonged, the scarlet bodywork catching the afternoon sun in a way that looked almost deliberate.

Leo kept his breathing steady and let the circuit speak.

---

Turn 1. The braking zone came up fast.

He hit the pedal at 78 metres, exactly where the simulation said, and the car responded — rear squatting, front diving, the nose pulling toward the apex with the precision of something that had done this before.

The sensation through the pedal was real. Resistance. Weight. The specific, grinding certainty of carbon brakes working against the speed of a real car on a real track.

This was not a haptic approximation or the pod’s mathematical rendering. It was the actual thing.

Leo deliberately let the corner happen beneath him and came off the braking zone two kilometres per hour slower than his limit. He was being conservative. The tyres were not ready, and he had no interest in asking them to do something they couldn’t yet give him.

Through the exit of Turn 1, he caught Rafael Vega’s ART car in his mirrors. The Spaniard was carrying too much speed into the apex, the rear going light for a fraction of a second before the car settled.

Vega recovered cleanly. It was the kind of recovery that looked spectacular from the grandstands and looked reckless from inside the cockpit.

Leo shook his head slightly.

’He’s pushing on cold tyres. He’ll be fast on his first flying lap and slow on his second when the fronts grain.’

He continued building his temperature run through the middle sector.

---

Sector 2 opened up.

The sweepers came one after another — quick, lateral load, the kind of sustained cornering that heated rubber faster than any single fast corner. He could feel the front tyres starting to come alive.

The steering grew heavier. The car stopped wandering and began to point precisely. The feedback through the column sharpened from a vague suggestion to something Leo could read like text.

’Front-left is there. Front-right is two degrees behind. One more lap.’

Around him, the circuit was filling with the chaos of twenty-two cars all trying to find clean air and warm rubber at the same time.

Felipe Santos’s DAMS car was a heavy and powerful car, the kind of machinery built for Feature Race pace. It was pushed through the back straight with a raw, mechanical aggression that Leo could feel in the air as it passed.

The Brazilian left very little room, pulling back in with the casual confidence of a man who had done this for years and expected everyone else to move.

Leo didn’t move, simply because he didn’t need to. He tracked the gap, tucked in close enough to read the turbulence off Santos’s rear wing with his "Slipstream Prediction," and let the airflow data stack behind his eyes.

’Santos’s rear wing angle is steeper than it looked in FP1. He’s sacrificed straight-line speed for downforce. He’ll be slow through the final chicane.’

Another rundown of his opponent marked—a weakness saved for later.

"Leo, Rossi’s first sector just came through," Elias said. "Purple. He’s at 28.4 through Sector 1."

The timing board on the dashboard updated.

1. A. Rossi (Prema) — S1: 28.4 🟣

2. T. Moreau (Prema) — S1: 28.7

3. O. Dubois (DAMS) — S1: 28.9

4. R. Vega (ART) — S1: 29.1

Leo glanced at the screen for one second and looked back at the track.

Rossi was already flying.

He felt something cold move through him. It was not fear or urgency, but something closer to the sensation the pod had produced on lap 78 of Monaco when the Ghost Driver had pulled half a second clear and every variable had suddenly compressed into a single, clear problem.

But he had solved that problem. He had solved it one hundred times, which was practically unheard of.

He was not afraid of Alessandro Rossi’s sector time.

He was only cataloguing it.

---

The back straight stretched out ahead of Leo.

Oscar Dubois’s DAMS car was immediately in front of him. The Australian was running a cooling lap before his hot attempt.

Dubois was the home hero. The grandstands that lined the back section of Albert Park had his name on banners and his team colours on flags — the specific, loud energy of a crowd that had come to see their driver do something that would give them a story to tell.

The Australian pushed hard through the Turn 9 complex. He was a little bit aggressive on the exit kerbs, his rear bouncing slightly over the rumble strips.