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.

Torque guns. Rapid footsteps across the rubber matting. Short, clipped words between mechanics that had been working together long enough to not need full sentences.

Leo stood beside the car and let the noise exist around him.

He was looking at the timing screen on the wall.

Elias came to stand beside him with a tablet, pulling up the sector-by-sector breakdown in a column format — each driver’s Sector 1, Sector 2, and Sector 3 time laid out side by side like a dissection.

Leo read it once, so he didn’t need to read it again.

---

Rossi’s lap was clean for every sector near the top. He showed no weakness in any individual segment. His Sector 2 was only marginally behind Leo’s purple — a gap of two-hundredths — and his Sector 3 was comfortably the fastest in the field.

1:28.2 overall.

A lap built by a driver who had done this long enough to know exactly what risk was worth taking and exactly where the limit lived.

The Italian wasn’t just fast. He was efficient. Every tenth was earned without waste.

’He will improve,’ Leo thought. ’He always improves in the final ten minutes when the track grips up. If Rossi runs again, he goes 1:27.9. Maybe lower.’

He moved his eyes to Moreau.

Theo Moreau’s data told a different story. His Sector 1 was good — not purple, but within two-tenths of Rossi, which was where a fast Prema car should live. His Sector 2 was the problem. Nearly three-tenths behind Rossi through the sweepers.

His Sector 3 was strong — aggressive, almost reckless through the chicane based on the speed trap numbers — but Sector 2 was costing him. The French driver was losing time in the high-speed left-handers.

Either a setup imbalance or he was managing the rear tyres earlier than the lap required.

’Moreau will improve in Sector 3 and lose the gap in Sector 2,’ Leo decided. ’His ceiling in Q1 is around 1:28.4. Possibly 1:28.3 on a perfect lap.’

He moved to Vega.

Rafael Vega’s numbers were sharp and uneven. His Sector 1 was excellent — 28.5, just behind Rossi, carried by raw pace and a high-risk entry to Turn 3 that the data showed had put his rear wheels six centimetres past the edge of the painted kerb.

It was legal, but right on the edge of the regulation limit. His Sector 2 was poor. His Sector 3 was good again.

The pattern was familiar. The Spaniard drove by feeling, not framework. When the feeling was right, the sector was good. When it wasn’t, the lap became uneven. He wasn’t building performance across three sectors. He was adding three individual efforts and hoping the gaps between them didn’t add up to too much time.

’He can’t sustain it,’ Leo thought. ’If his tyres grain in Sector 2 during the final push, he drops out of the top six.’

Oscar Dubois was sitting P3. The Australian’s data showed a driver who knew every corner of his home circuit. His Sector 2 was the smoothest in the field apart from Leo’s. Clean, controlled, line-perfect. But his Sector 1 was half a tenth slower than it should have been for a car with DAMS’s straight-line pace advantage.

’He’s conservative into Turn 1,’ Leo noted. ’He’s protecting his front-left. Either the tyre is running warm or the setup is understeering on corner entry. If it’s setup, DAMS will fix it before the second run. If it’s the tyre, it’ll get worse.’

He turned to the bottom of the leaderboard.

Marcus Berg sat at P9. A 1:29.3.

Leo looked at the number for exactly two seconds. His Sector 2 was behind his Sector 1, which was behind his Sector 3. The lap had no shape. It had the kind of time distribution that came from a driver pushing harder at the end of a lap than the beginning — trying to make up ground that the earlier sectors had already given away.

It was a frustrated lap.

Leo moved his eyes away.

---

"Wing adjustment first," Pete said, appearing at Leo’s shoulder with his hands already moving toward the front wing endplate. "Three clicks of downforce up. Should tighten the front-end through the chicane and help the entry into Turn 1."

"Two clicks," Leo said.

Pete stopped. "Two?"

"Two. Three gives me too much understeer in Sector 2. The sweepers need the front to rotate freely."

Pete looked at Elias. Elias pulled up the aero data on his tablet, ran a finger down the column of numbers, and nodded once. "He’s right. Two clicks keeps the balance neutral through Turn 7. Three pushes the front axle load over what the compound wants."

Pete turned back to the car without another word and made the adjustment.

Sam appeared on Leo’s left with a printout. Tyre pressure readings from the previous run. Both fronts had come in slightly above the target window — the result of the lap generating more surface heat than the pre-session model had predicted. The rears were exactly on target.

"Front pressures," Leo said, looking at the sheet. "Drop them by 0.3 bar going out."

"That’s outside the window Elias set for this—" Sam started.

"The track is 1.8 degrees cooler than the model," Leo said. "Lower pressure compensates. The fronts will still hit the target window by the end of the out-lap."

Sam looked at Elias.

Elias had stopped questioning the adjustments Leo suggested after the FP2 long run, when Leo had called a brake balance shift that improved his rear tyre wear by three percent over six laps. He simply typed the new target pressure into the system.

The mechanic handling the tyre inflation rig adjusted the values without comment.