Chapter 100: Saturday Sprint; Reversed Grid
Leo turned back toward the garage.
Anya was standing at the entrance. She had a jacket over her team kit and a coffee in her hand and she was watching him with the expression she had been wearing since the time locked in — not the professional face, not the team principal face.
The face of someone who had been doing this for eleven years and had stopped expecting to feel the thing she was feeling and was now standing in the Albert Park paddock at dusk trying to decide what to do with it.
He walked toward her.
"Press conference in twenty minutes," she said.
"I know."
"They'll ask you about the car. About the team. About—" she paused. "About you. About what you did today and how you did it."
"I know what to say."
She looked at him for a moment.
"What will you say?"
He thought about the Simex pod at Silverstone at 3 AM. The laptop on the floor. The pod chair and the haptic gloves and the two hundred laps of Monaco and Suzuka that lived in his nervous system and had produced a 1:26.1 at a circuit he had never driven before today.
He thought about what he could say and what he could not say and what was true inside both of those constraints.
"I'll say the car was ready," he said. "And I was ready. And tomorrow we'll be ready again."
Anya looked at him for a long moment.
Then she nodded once.
She turned back into the garage.
He followed her in.
Behind him, the Albert Park circuit went quiet in the Melbourne dusk — the rubber on the track, the marks in the tarmac, the record on the timing board that would sit there until tomorrow's sessions began.
His name at the top of it.
The number below it.
The morning would come with the Sprint Race and the pressure that came with leading from the front and the rivals who had spent the evening studying everything he had shown them today.
He had shown them a lot, but had kept more.
Friday was over. He was ready for Saturday.
---
The sun came up over Albert Park and the circuit was already awake.
Leo had been at the track for forty minutes before the first mechanics arrived. He had come in through the service entrance on the far side of the paddock, the route that avoided the media pens and the hospitality walkways and the gathering crowd of fans pressing against the outer fences with phones raised.
He had a coffee in his hand and his data tablet under his arm and he had walked through the quiet corridors of the paddock in the specific, unhurried way of someone who had somewhere to be and was not in a hurry to get there.
The Arcadia garage was unlocked. He had the code.
He went in.
The car sat on its stand in the centre of the garage floor. Number 24. Deep indigo and matte black. The livery catching the overhead fluorescent light and doing what it always did — absorbing it rather than reflecting it back, the colours going darker under artificial light in a way that made the car look like it was already in motion.
He sat down at the engineering station and opened the overnight data package.
Elias had sent it at 11 PM. Forty-seven pages of telemetry analysis from the Q3 lap, tyre wear projections for the Sprint Race, a competitor breakdown of expected race pace based on FP2 long run data, and a weather note at the bottom that said Saturday morning: partly cloudy, track temperature projected at 36°C by Sprint start, no rain.
He read it. All of it.
Not quickly. Carefully. The way he had read the Suzuka circuit layout six minutes before his first pod session there — looking not just at the data but at what the data implied. What it left out. What the numbers said when you put them beside each other in ways the author of the report hadn't arranged them.
By the time Pete arrived at 7:15 with three other mechanics behind him, Leo was on his second read-through of the tyre projection data and his coffee was cold.
"You sleep?" Pete asked.
"Enough," Leo said.
Pete looked at him for a second. Then he nodded and started pulling the equipment covers off the car. The mechanics moved around him in their morning sequence — checks and clearances and the low, efficient conversation of people beginning a day of work they already knew how to do.
The garage filled up.
And when Anya arrived at 7:40 with her tablet and two fresh coffees, the atmosphere had already shifted from the quiet of the early morning into something that had more energy in it. Something that had been building since the timing board had locked in at 1:26.1 the previous afternoon and hadn't fully dissipated across the night.
She handed Leo one of the coffees and pulled a chair to the engineering station.
"Reversed grid," she said.
"I know."
"You start P10."
"I know."
She looked at him. "You read the sporting regulations overnight."
"I read them last week," he said. "When I was preparing."
She set her tablet on the table and pulled up the Sprint Race grid.
"The reversed grid applies to the top ten qualifiers. So—" she traced the column with her finger, "—Matteo Rossi from Invicta starts P1. Santos P2. Nakamura P3. Khalil P4. Bennett P5. Dubois P6. Vega P7. Moreau P8. Alessandro Rossi P9." She stopped at the bottom of the reversed section. "You start P10."
Leo looked at the grid.
[Sprint Race Grid:]
P1 — M. Rossi (Invicta)
P2 — F. Santos (DAMS)
P3 — K. Nakamura (Hitech)
P4 — J. Khalil (Hitech)
P5 — L. Bennett (ART)
P6 — O. Dubois (DAMS)
P7 — R. Vega (ART)
P8 — T. Moreau (Prema)
P9 — A. Rossi (Prema)
P10 — L. Kaito (Arcadia) ★
...
P15 — M. Berg (Arcadia)
Leo looked at it for a while.