The crowd in the stands rose slightly as Dubois’s DAMS car came into their view, and Leo could hear the distant wave of noise even over the engine sitting three inches behind his head.

Dubois was carrying the weight of his home stadium, while Leo was carrying a nagging timer counting down his remaining days.

Neither of them could see the other’s burden.

He tracked Dubois through the braking zone for Turn 10. The Australian was precise here — clean, efficient, the kind of driver who had studied this circuit in his sleep and arrived with a blueprint. He wasn’t taking risks. He was executing everything tactics he’d learned.

’He’ll be strong in the middle sector,’ Leo noted. ’He knows every bump on this track. He’ll use the local knowledge the way a home crowd uses it — as a weapon.’

The DAMS car pulled ahead as Dubois hit his final warm-up sector.

Leo let him go. He crossed the line at the end of the out-lap and the dash updated.

His tyres read 89 and 87 degrees. Both fronts. Both rears within one degree of each other.

The window was open.

"Tyres are ready," Leo said.

"Copy," Elias replied immediately. "You’re clear ahead. Rossi is already through his sector 3. Moreau is on his push. One car between you and clean air — Matteo Rossi, Invicta, about to peel off on his cool-down. Give him a hundred metres and you’ll have the track."

"Understood."

Leo came out of Turn 16. The long run toward Turn 1 opened up ahead. The grandstands on the main straight were packed — a wall of colour and noise visible even through the narrow visor slit. He saw the giant timing screen above the pit lane update.

1. A. Rossi (Prema) — 1:28.6

2. T. Moreau (Prema) — 1:28.9

3. O. Dubois (DAMS) — 1:29.2

4. R. Vega (ART) — 1:29.4

Rossi had broken his own FP1 benchmark by half a second.

Leo stared at the screen for a moment.

’He wasn’t even fully committed in FP1,’ he thought. ’He was playing the same game I was.’

The cold thing in his chest moved again. Something that was closer to respect — the specific, weaponised kind. The kind the pod had taught him to feel toward the Ghost Drivers who had forced him to evolve.

Rossi was not a problem to be dismissed. He was a benchmark to be beaten.

Leo set his jaw.

He brought the car through Turn 1 at full qualifying pace for the first time.

---

The sensation was immediate and total.

The front tyres bit into the Albert Park asphalt with a sharpness that had not been there on the out-lap.

The steering column became a direct line between his hands and the road surface — every grain of texture, every micro-variation in the tarmac, every degree of camber feeding through the wheel and into his palms.

The simulation had built this sensitivity. The simulation had calibrated his hands to read exactly this kind of data.

He didn’t fight the car. He listened to it.

The braking zone for Turn 1 arrived at 290 kilometres per hour. He hit the pedal hard — later than the simulation’s conservative target, exactly on the limit the real tyre data had shown him was available.

The car lurched forward against the harness. His helmet pushed into the headrest. His vision narrowed at the edges.

G-forces.

Real ones. Not the pod’s approximation. The kind that made the liquid in your inner ear move and the capillaries in your face tighten and the muscles in your neck work to keep your head pointing at the apex.

He found the apex, clean and exact.

"Sector 1 — 28.7," Elias said, voice controlled.

Leo processed the number without taking his eyes off Turn 3. Not purple. Two-tenths behind Rossi. Deliberately within the window he had planned — quick enough to advance but not quick enough to announce anything.

’Save the tyres. Save the surprise. One more lap.’

"Copy," Leo said.

He entered Sector 2.

---

The sweepers were where the real work lived.

The Auditory Mapping was active — the specific, layered sound of the tyre contact patch carrying more information than the sensors could deliver in real time. He heard the front-right working harder than the front-left through the long left-hand sweeper at Turn 7. A fraction. Almost nothing.

He reduced his steering angle by two millimetres. Redistributed the load. The sound evened out.

The car rotated cleaner. The rear stepped once — a sharp, fast movement that any normal rookie would have caught on instinct and overcorrected.

Leo caught it smoothly with one millimetre of opposite lock, held it for three-tenths of a second, and released before the counter-reaction could upset the balance.

The car didn’t even know it had moved.

"Sector 2 — purple," Elias said. A different quality in his voice. "You’re fastest through Sector 2. By two-tenths."

One beat of silence on the radio.

Then Anya spoke, her voice quieter and more careful. "Leo. Stay composed, okay."

Leo nodded.

He was already in Sector 3. The final complex. The short braking zones and the fast chicane sections that punished tyre degradation and rewarded drivers who had managed the first two sectors with the discipline to still have rubber left when it mattered.

He had the rubber, since he had planned it that way.

The chicane came next. He clipped the kerb on the left slightly — not the outside edge that Vega had been using, but the inner line, the one the simulation had built as the faster geometric path even though it felt slower because it had less visual reference from the cockpit. Two tenths gained over the final complex compared to the visual line.

He crossed the line.

The dash updated immediately.

His name moved up a few places.

1. A. Rossi (Prema) — 1:28.6

2. L. Kaito (Arcadia) — 1:28.8 (Sector 2 purple)

3. T. Moreau (Prema) — 1:28.9

4. O. Dubois (DAMS) — 1:29.2