On the broadcast screen visible through the Turn 3 barrier gap, the graphic showed five cars eliminated. Berg’s name on the list. The word ELIMINATED in clean white text beside it.

Leo looked at the screen for one second as he passed.

Then he looked back at the track ahead.

Q3 was next.

Ten cars. Pole position. The real session.

Everything until now had been scouting. Everything until now had been building the library, reading the rivals, testing the limits of what the circuit and the car and the compound would give him.

Q3 was the last corner before the finish line.

He rolled into the pit lane and felt the Albert Park asphalt shift to the smoother concrete of the garage floor beneath his tyres. 𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂

The session had ended.

He had not yet driven his fastest lap.

---

The garage changed when Q2 ended.

Not physically. The walls were the same. The monitors were the same. The smell of hot rubber and carbon and the faint chemical bite of brake dust that had settled into every surface over two sessions of hard running. None of that changed.

What changed was the number above the pit lane entrance.

Ten.

Ten cars. Ten drivers. The rest of the field was finished for the afternoon — their garage doors pulling down, their mechanics beginning the quiet work of packing away a session that hadn’t ended the way they wanted. The background noise of a twenty-two car paddock had thinned. The circuit was emptier. The air felt different in the way that a room feels different when half the people in it leave.

Leo sat in the garage on the low equipment case near the rear wall. His helmet was on the shelf. His gloves were in his lap.

He was doing the thing he did between sessions. Not reviewing data — Elias had the data. Not eating — Anya had put food in front of him and he had eaten half of it without tasting it. He was sitting still and letting his heart rate drop and letting the framework process everything the previous two sessions had given it.

The information was substantial.

Rossi’s Turn 1 entry at maximum commitment. Moreau’s rear wing angle and its effect on his Sector 2 balance. Vega’s exit habit through Turn 7. Nakamura’s tyre loading sequence on the out-lap.

The specific grip texture of the Albert Park racing line at the T9 complex after thirty cars had laid rubber across it. The temperature differential between the back section and the front section that the model had missed.

All of it was inside the framework. Running. Cross-referencing.

He looked at his right hand.

The forearm was at 55 percent. Worse than the estimate he had made before Q2’s second run. The G-forces through the Turn 7 manoeuvre on Moreau had cost more than projected. The sustained load of the Vega pass had added to it. He would have full function through the push laps. He would feel it in the night.

’One more session,’ he thought. ’Two laps. Three at most.’

He could give two laps what they needed.

---

Elias appeared at his shoulder with the tablet.

The screen showed ten names in a column. The Q3 grid positions were not yet assigned — those would come from the session itself — but the Q2 times that each driver had carried through the cut sat beside their names. A reference point. Not a ceiling.

1. L. Kaito (Arcadia) — 1:26.9

2. A. Rossi (Prema) — 1:27.0

3. T. Moreau (Prema) — 1:27.4

4. R. Vega (ART) — 1:27.6

5. O. Dubois (DAMS) — 1:27.8

6. L. Bennett (ART) — 1:27.9

7. J. Khalil (Hitech) — 1:28.1

8. K. Nakamura (Hitech) — 1:28.3

9. F. Santos (DAMS) — 1:28.5

10. M. Rossi (Invicta) — 1:28.6

Leo read the column once.

"Rossi will improve," Elias said. "He hasn’t shown his absolute ceiling yet. The Prema data in Q2 showed brake bias adjustments between runs that usually precede an aggressive final session. He’s been managing something."

"I know," Leo said.

"He’s also the only driver in the field who has run this circuit in Formula 2 before. Last year he started from pole. He knows the references. He knows where the grip is."

"I know that too."

Elias paused. He had the look of an engineer who was trying to determine whether the driver he was speaking to was calmly confident or dangerously unaware of the scale of the thing in front of him.

He had been watching Leo all weekend. He had decided it was the former. But the scientist in him required one more data point.

"You went 1:26.9 with three cars in your way in Sector 2," Elias said. "Do you know what the clean lap looks like?"

Leo looked at the timing column for one more second.

"Yes," he said.

Elias closed the tablet.

---

The Freedom Units sat at the back of his mind like a second clock.

Not intrusive. Not loud. But there. A low, constant presence behind every calculation and every decision and every lap time that the session had produced.

Ten units. Two hundred and forty hours.

A podium finish would generate new units. The system had told him that at the beginning. Had told him the specific transaction: top three finishes replenish the supply. The further back he finished, the fewer units the result produced. Outside the top five, the gain barely covered the daily cost.

He needed to lead. He needed to win, or come close enough to it that the transaction worked in his favour.

Pole position was not a race result. But pole position set up the race. Pole position was the first corner advantage. The clean air. The undercut immunity. The strategic leverage that turned a fast car into a winning car across thirty laps of Feature Race distance.

From pole, he could control the race.

From P3 or P4, he would spend the Feature Race fighting through traffic with a car that was quick but not dominant, burning tyre life that he needed for the final stint, giving away the strategic options he needed to produce a race result that kept the clock from running out.

Pole position was survival.