The Arcadia #24 was one metre and ninety centimetres wide at the bodywork.

He went left.

The gap opened by exactly the margin the skill had predicted. Vega’s ART car passed his right sidepod by seventeen centimetres.

The turbulence from the other car’s rear wing hit him like a flat hand — a sudden, firm pressure across the front of the chassis that pushed the nose fractionally wide.

Leo caught it with five millimetres of steering input. Not a correction, but a conversation with the car.

He kept the throttle open.

"That was close," Elias said, his voice carrying the sharp quality of a man who had seen the data spike on his monitor.

"It was fine," Leo said.

He didn’t mean it dismissively. He meant it precisely. It had been fine. The gap had been measured and the gap had been there and the car had gone through it and the tyre loads were still within the window.

He came through Turn 9 two-tenths faster than any lap this session.

"Sector 2," Elias said. Then a full second of silence. "Sector 2 is purple. Again. By four-tenths overall."

On the timing screens above the pit lane, Leo’s name moved.

Anya’s voice came through, low and controlled. "Leo. Sector 3. Whatever you do — bring the car home clean."

He was already in it.

---

Sector 3 began well.

The short run to the chicane complex was exactly as the simulation had built it. He hit the braking marker. The car dived. The front-left responded with the same sharp, loaded bite it had given him through the whole lap — hard, committed, and precise.

He threaded the first part of the chicane.

Then he saw Enzo Leclerc.

The Invicta car was parked half off the racing line on the exit of the second chicane element — not stopped, not crashed, just moving at recovery pace with his right-front tyre clearly flat, the rubber flapping against the tarmac in loose, ragged strips.

Leclerc had picked up debris somewhere in the middle sector. He was limping back. He was doing it slowly and he was doing it directly across the path Leo needed.

There was no gap on the left. The barrier was eight metres away and a recovery marshal’s board was being held at shoulder height at the edge of it.

Leo braked.

Not a hard or panicked brake, but real carefully. Earlier than planned. He moved the brake bias three clicks to the front in one fast thumb movement and hit the pedal at sixty-two metres rather than the fifty-four he had planned.

The front tyres locked for three-tenths of a second — a short, sharp shudder through the wheel that translated into a flat spot he felt immediately across his palms.

He steered around Leclerc’s wounded car.

The flat spot killed his exit. The front-right was grabbing slightly at the edge of its load range — a vibration, subtle but present, riding up through the steering column and into his hands.

He kept the throttle buried but the line through the final corner was compromised. It was half a metre wider than optimal. The car understeered fractionally on exit.

He crossed the line.

The dash updated.

[4. L. Kaito (Arcadia) — 1:28.4 (Sector 2 purple)]

Behind him, on the screens, the broadcast graphic updated.

[KAITO GOES P4 — ROOKIE ARCADIA DRIVER CONTINUES TO IMPRESS.]

He drove the cool-down lap at eighty percent. The flat spot on the front-right made itself known through every corner — a rhythmic, low-frequency shudder that increased under braking load. This was not dangerous. Just annoying. A cost he hadn’t planned for. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

"Leclerc was stationary on your racing line," Elias said. "Sector 3 was compromised. The lock-up cost you somewhere between two and three-tenths. Without the traffic, that’s a 1:28.1."

Leo processed this.

A 1:28.1 without the incident. That was two-tenths behind Rossi’s current benchmark.

’Which means Rossi’s benchmark is still within reach,’ he thought. ’Which means this lap — this compromised, traffic-ruined lap — has still put me P4 and revealed nothing about what Sector 1 looks like when I fully commit.’

He felt the dark amusement build in his chest. Cold and quiet.

He imagined the broadcast team. The commentators reaching for the script they had already written about him — the "one-hit wonder," the "tech-turned-driver," the flash-in-the-pan rookie who had shown pace in FP1 before the real world reminded him of his place. They were going to have to update that script now.

He imagined the headline forming somewhere in a press box above the grandstands.

[ROOKIE SHOWS PACE AGAIN — CAN KAITO HOLD ON FOR Q2?]

The dark amusement sharpened.

They still thought "showing pace" was the story. They still thought the question was whether he could hold on.

They had not yet understood that holding on was not what he had come here to do.

---

In the Prema garage, Alessandro Rossi stood at the pit wall with his arms folded, watching the timing screen. His engineer said something in Italian beside him. Rossi nodded once, slowly, and his eyes stayed on Leo’s name in P4.

His face showed nothing.

But his engineer noticed — the way the Italian’s jaw set slightly, the way his eyes tracked the Arcadia name for a second longer than they tracked anyone else on the board.

In the ART garage, Vega had already climbed out of his car for a tyre change. One of his mechanics mentioned Leo’s near-miss through the sweeper. Vega listened, but said nothing. His expression was not dismissive anymore.

The paddock had been watching a rookie showing flashes of pace. The paddock was now watching someone sitting P4 with a compromised final sector and a flat-spotted tyre.

The math was available to anyone paying attention.

---

The garage was loud in a specific way.

Not the chaotic loud or the panicked loud. But the kind of loud that came from twenty people all doing something urgent at the same time and none of them wasting a single movement on anything that wasn’t necessary.