Leo said that quietly, not as a boast. He meant it the way a person states a fact about the weather—naturally.

Anya held his eyes for a moment. She had been in motorsport for eleven years. She had managed drivers who promised things and delivered partial versions of those things. She had managed drivers who undersold and overdelivered.

She was beginning to understand which category Leo Kaito belonged to.

"Fourteen minutes on the clock," she said. "We want you out in the next three. That puts your flying lap in the Q1 window when the track is at its fastest. The rubber laid down from the early runs will still be clean."

"Understood."

"Also—" she paused. "The broadcast team has you on their feed. Sky Sports has mentioned your name four times in the last eight minutes. There are cameras on the pit wall. If you go P1 in Q1—"

"When," Leo said.

Anya stopped.

"When," she repeated. The word landed differently than she expected.

She nodded once and turned back to the pit wall.

---

The pit lane exit was a green strip of light.

Leo rolled through it and felt the Albert Park asphalt take the weight of the car. The new tyres were cold. Stiff. The steering had the heavy, unresponsive quality of fresh rubber that hadn’t seen heat yet — like pushing through something that wasn’t ready to cooperate.

He had one out-lap to change that.

He pushed the throttle through Turn 1 of the installation sequence and worked the car with quick, deliberate inputs. Not aggressive. Not lazy. Precise.

He scrubbed the left-front through the entry. He loaded the right-rear through the exit. He built the surface temperature layer by layer, the way the simulation had drilled into his hands during the long Monaco runs where cold tyres at the wrong moment had cost him podiums in the ranking sessions.

"Fronts at 78," he said.

"Building well," Elias replied. "On the out-lap trajectory, you’ll be at optimal by the chicane complex. Q1 clock is at 10:14. Pit lane is still active — four cars are on push laps ahead of you. Expect traffic in Sectors 2 and 3."

Leo said nothing.

He already knew the traffic was there. He had watched the session unfold from the garage. Zhang Wei had gone out two minutes before him — the AIX car, steady pace, a driver who was disciplined but not fast enough to threaten the top ten.

Victor Moreau had left just before that, the second AIX driver, a lap time in the 1:29s that wasn’t going to move either of them anywhere. And somewhere in the middle of the sector, Luca Moretti’s Trident car was doing something that the data suggested was closer to a controlled crawl than a push lap.

The circuit was not clean. He knew that going in.

He filed it and moved on.

---

The out-lap ended.

He crossed the line and the flying lap timer began.

He hit the throttle hard down the main straight and Albert Park opened up ahead of him — the long, gold-lit run to Turn 1 that the grandstands lined on both sides, the track surface marked with the dark rubber trails of twenty cars that had come before him and laid down the grip he was about to use.

290 kilometres per hour.

The braking marker appeared. He arrived at it seventeen milliseconds faster than his first push lap. Not planned. The result of a clean out-lap, fresh rubber, and a track that had continued rubbering in while he sat in the garage working through sector data.

He hit the pedal.

The car dove. Nose dropping, weight slamming forward, the rear going light in the way that a well-set-up car does when the geometry is right and the driver trusts it enough not to back off when it happens. He felt the harness load against his chest. His neck worked to hold his head stable.

He found the Turn 1 apex.

Cleaner than his first run. Tighter. The front-right was within a centimetre of the white paint. He could feel it through the column.

He came off the braking zone with 4 more kilometres per hour of exit speed than his previous best. It wasn’t a decision. It was the result of the setup change and the tyre window and two hundred laps of simulation compressing into a movement that his hands produced before his mind finished forming the instruction.

He hit the back straight. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

"Sector 1," Elias said. One second of silence. Then: "28.0. Purple. Matching Rossi’s benchmark."

Leo was already braking for Turn 3.

’Not matching,’ he thought. ’Equalling with cold tyres still two degrees under the window. When they fully arrive—’

He didn’t finish the thought. Turn 3 needed his hands.

He clipped the apex on the exit kerb with his right rear and used the bounce to carry momentum onto the next straight. The timing screen on the bridge above the track updated as he passed beneath it.

[1. L. Kaito (Arcadia) — S1: 28.0★]

He didn’t look at it. He was already 300 metres down the road.

---

Sector 2 started well.

The sweepers felt different on fresh rubber. The car rotated faster. The front end was alive in a way that the degraded compound from the first run hadn’t been — sharp, direct, every millimetre of steering input translating immediately into direction change.

The Auditory Mapping read the sound of the contact patch against the Albert Park tarmac and the sound was good. Even. Clean. The tyre was in the window.

He carried 6.1G through Turn 7.

He had never felt 6.1G in the simulation. The pod topped out at the physical threshold its haptic system could generate — somewhere around 5.4G before the neural scaling compensated.

The real thing was significantly different. His vision narrowed at the edges, blurring for a moment. The blood in his arms and legs felt like it weighed twice what it should on a normal day.