"P2," Elias said. The controlled voice had a thread of something else running through it now. "That’s P2, Leo. Sector 2 is yours. Full lap is two-tenths off Rossi."

Leo drove the cooling curve out of Turn 1 without reacting.

P2 was not where he was going to finish.

This was the first lap, otherwise known as the conservative one. The one designed to show the paddock just enough to keep them from writing him off — but not enough to make Rossi change his plan, not enough to make Prema run an extra timed lap, not enough to let anyone see what Sector 1 looked like when he stopped holding back.

He rolled through Turn 3 slowly and watched the timing screen on the bridge above the track update again in real time. Moreau had just gone P3.

Vega had dropped to P5 after a scrappy run through the chicane. Berg had gone P8 after running a solid lap, nothing more.

Below Leo’s name, the rest of the field was scrambling.

Above it, Rossi sat alone in first place, comfortable, unaware.

"Elias," Leo said, voice completely flat. "I’m going one more lap. Full attack."

A pause on the radio.

"Full attack?" Elias asked.

"Full attack," Leo confirmed.

The pit wall went quiet for two seconds.

Then Anya’s voice came through the comms. Just four words. The kind that meant she understood something was about to happen that the session hadn’t yet shown anyone it was capable of.

"Tyres are yours, Leo."

He crossed the line again and the out-lap timer reset.

The second push was coming. And this time, he was not going to hold anything back.

---

The out-lap took two minutes and forty seconds.

Leo used every one of them to his advantage.

He worked the tyres through the long back section — slow, deliberate inputs through each corner, scrubbing the surface temperature up without burning the compound edge.

The Arcadia #24 moved through the lower part of the circuit like something that was choosing its moment. Not slow out of caution. Slow out of calculation.

The tyres were at 91 degrees by the time he reached the Turn 14 complex. Ninety-one. Exactly where the simulation’s tyre model had placed the optimal attack window for a circuit with Albert Park’s surface roughness and this afternoon’s track temperature.

He rolled through the final corner. The start-finish line came into view ahead.

The grandstands on both sides were full. Sound built as he emerged from the shadow of the final chicane — a rising, formless roar that wasn’t aimed at him specifically but existed because twenty-two cars were about to do the thing crowds paid to watch.

"Clear ahead," Elias said. "Moreau is three seconds in front. He’s just crossed the line. You’ll have clean air through Sector 1 and most of Sector 2. There’s a cluster forming at the back of the field but nothing that should reach you before the chicane."

"Copy."

"Anya says — full commitment. All three sectors. The car can do it."

Leo didn’t answer.

He crossed the line.

The flying lap began.

---

Sector 1 arrived like a wall. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

He hit Turn 1 at 295 kilometres per hour and braked exactly four metres later than he had on the first push lap. The difference was small by any measure. By the measure of what it meant, it was everything.

Four metres of straight-line speed carried deeper into the braking zone. Four metres of late commitment that his tyres — now fully alive, fully loaded — could absorb without protest.

The car rotated.

Not gradually, the way a car rotates when a driver forces it with too much steering angle. It rotated because the rear was perfectly balanced and the front had exactly the right load on it and everything he had built across two hundred laps of simulation was pointing at this corner from the inside of his nervous system.

He found the apex with his right-front tyre within a centimetre.

He didn’t think about it. His hands moved before the thought formed.

Through Turn 2, he kept the throttle buried two-tenths of a second longer than his first push lap. The rear slid outward — a controlled, shallow movement that widened his exit line and put him on the racing line for Turn 3 without a steering correction. He had used that slide. Made it work for him.

The car came off Turn 3 onto the back straight. The engine built behind his head — that specific bark, the real-world roughness that the pod had never fully replicated — and the Albert Park scenery became a blur of green and grey and blue at the edges of his visor.

"Sector 1 — 28.2," Elias said.

A pause.

"That’s purple, Leo. By two-tenths."

Purple Sector 1. Two-tenths ahead of Rossi.

Leo’s expression behind the balaclava didn’t move. He was already braking for the Turn 9 complex.

’Two-tenths in Sector 1. Expected. The simulation showed this was available on a full-attack lap with the tyres in the right window.’

He filed it and moved on.

---

Sector 2 was a fight. Not against the car or the circuit, but against the very real, very sudden presence of Rafael Vega’s ART machine appearing at the edge of Leo’s vision as he came through the Turn 7 left-hander.

The Spaniard was on a cool-down lap — or should have been. Instead, Vega was carrying competitive pace through the sweeper, his ART car sitting directly on the racing line with the unaware confidence of a driver who hadn’t checked his mirrors.

Leo saw the gap.

Forty metres. Closing at a rate that had no tolerance.

He didn’t lift or brake. He calculated.

The Auditory Mapping read the gap in the air between the two cars — not consciously, not as a thought, but the way a hand reads heat before touching metal.

He knew, without choosing to know, that the gap to the left of Vega’s car was two metres and seven centimetres wide at the point where the Turn 7 exit kerb began.