On the wall monitor, the final Q1 classification locked in.

Q1 — CLASSIFIED

✅ ADVANCED TO Q2:

1. A. Rossi (Prema) — 1:27.5

2. L. Kaito (Arcadia) — 1:27.8

3. T. Moreau (Prema) — 1:28.3

4. O. Dubois (DAMS) — 1:28.6

5. R. Vega (ART) — 1:28.7

6. L. Bennett (ART) — 1:28.8

7. K. Nakamura (Hitech) — 1:29.0

8. J. Khalil (Hitech) — 1:29.1

9. F. Santos (DAMS) — 1:29.2

10. M. Rossi (Invicta) — 1:29.3

11. N. Eriksson (MP) — 1:29.4

12. D. Morales (MP) — 1:29.5

13. R. Kumar (Campos) — 1:29.6

14. E. Leclerc (Invicta) — 1:29.7

15. M. Berg (Arcadia) — 1:29.8

❌ ELIMINATED:

16. A. Haddad (Trident) — 1:29.9

17. C. Rivera (Campos) — 1:30.1 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

18. F. Hartmann (VAR) — 1:30.2

19. L. O’Connor (VAR) — 1:30.4

20. L. Moretti (Trident) — 1:30.6

21. V. Moreau (AIX) — 1:30.9

22. Z. Wei (AIX) — 1:31.2

Seven cars done for the day.

Fifteen going forward.

Leo read the list once from top to bottom. He read it the way he read tyre data — looking not at the names but at the gaps.

The gaps told the story. Between P1 and P2, two-tenths. Between P2 and P3, half a second. Between P3 and P15, one and a half seconds.

The field had two cars in a different conversation.

Him and Rossi.

Everyone else was racing for whatever was left.

He reached for his helmet from the shelf.

Eight minutes until Q2.

The real qualifying session was just starting.

---

Eight minutes passed like two.

The garage didn’t stop. It couldn’t. The mechanics moved from one task to the next without pause — tyre pressures checked, wheel nuts torqued, the aero sensors on the front wing endplates inspected and cleared from the data residue of Q1.

Elias sat at the engineering station with three screens open, running the Q2 tyre allocation model alongside the sector-by-sector breakdown of every car that had made it through.

Leo stood at the back of the garage and let the noise happen around him.

He was looking at his hands.

Not examining them. Just looking. The tendons along the back of his right forearm were raised slightly — the specific, low-level tightness that built across two hard push laps and a cool-down run on a circuit that demanded constant steering input through its middle sector.

His neck was the same. A deep, settled ache that lived below the base of his skull and radiated down toward his shoulders.

The pod had simulated G-forces. Had simulated the load on the neck, the fatigue in the forearms, the specific way the body loaded and unloaded across a lap. But simulation was approximation.

The real thing was accumulative in a way the pod had never quite captured — every lap adding a fraction more weight to the same muscles until the fractions started to add up.

He rolled his neck once. Felt the resistance.

Fourteen drivers were still in the session. Fourteen cars were either leaving the pit lane or about to. Q2 was a different animal from Q1.

In Q1, the gap between survival and elimination was wide enough that careful pace management was still an option. In Q2, the top ten advanced to Q3 and the bottom five went home.

Ten cars. Five places to fill. Fifteen drivers who all believed, in varying degrees, that they deserved to be in the group that went forward.

The mathematics were simple.

The racing was not.

---

Anya came to stand beside him with a bottle of water and the expression she had been wearing since his P2 time had locked in — the one that was holding back something that wasn’t quite pride, because pride in this context would mean she hadn’t believed it was possible before it happened.

She handed him the bottle.

"Q2 rules," she said. "Top ten advance. Bottom five go home. We’re on the second fresh set. Elias wants you to manage the first lap conservatively and push on the second when the track has more rubber on it."

Leo drank from the bottle and handed it back.

"I’m not going conservative," he said.

Anya kept her voice level. "The tyre model says the second lap will give you another two-tenths from track evolution alone. If you preserve the compound on lap one—"

"Rossi won’t go conservative," Leo said. "Moreau won’t. The gap to P10 will be four-tenths by the end of the first push window. If I’m holding a time from a managed lap and the session gets interrupted—" he looked at her, "—I’m out."

Anya was quiet for two seconds.

"The session getting interrupted would require a red flag."

"Leclerc’s car is still damaged," Leo said. "And Vega overdrives every second lap."

She looked at the timing board for a moment. Then back at him.

"Push on lap one," she said. "We’ll hold the second set if we need to respond."

Leo nodded once.

He picked up his helmet.

---

The Q2 pit lane felt different.

Narrower somehow. Not physically — the dimensions were identical to Q1. But the fifteen cars filling it were all moving with a sharpness that Q1’s larger field had diluted.

These were the fifteen fastest cars from the first session, and the ones at the back of that list knew exactly how thin their margin for error had become.

Leo rolled to the pit lane exit behind Kimi Nakamura’s Hitech car.

The Japanese driver was meticulous in his preparation. Even on the out-lap, his line through the pit lane chicane was precise — the specific controlled movement of a driver who treated every metre of tarmac as an opportunity to gather data.

Nakamura was not the fastest driver in the field. He was the most consistent. His tyre management in the second half of races was the best statistic on the grid.

In Q2, with limited rubber and a single-lap window that might not come again, that consistency made him dangerous.

Leo watched Nakamura’s line through the first curve past the pit exit.

The Japanese driver ran the outside edge of the track — wider than necessary, deliberately loading the right-side tyres through the left-hander.

A warm-up technique that was precise and methodical. The same way Leo had been taught in the pod that tyre temperature distribution mattered more than raw heat.