Formula 1: Infinite Simulation Mode

Leo looked at it for a while.

Nine cars between him and the front. Twenty-three laps. A circuit with limited overtaking spots. A field that had spent the night studying his qualifying data and building new race pace models with his name at the centre of them.

He felt the cold thing in his chest settle deeper.

'Nine cars,' he thought. 'In twenty-three laps.'

Anya was watching him. Waiting for a reaction that matched the scale of the information she had just delivered.

He handed back her tablet.

"The long back straight," he said. "Two DRS zones. Turn 9 entry is a legitimate overtaking point. Turn 1 if the car ahead is defending late. Turn 3 for the brave."

"Leo—"

"Nakamura manages his rear tyres. He'll protect position in the middle sector but he'll fade in the final third. Santos is strong in the first fifteen laps and drops off. Khalil defends hard but his car is slow on the straight without DRS." He looked at the grid again. "M. Rossi is in P1 and he'll be fighting to stay there. He'll be slow. He'll also be desperate, which makes him unpredictable."

Anya was quiet for a moment.

"Most drivers would be asking me how to survive a reversed grid start," she said.

"I'm not asking that," Leo said.

She looked at the grid on the tablet.

"No," she said. "I can see that."

---

Marcus Berg arrived at 8:10.

He came in through the back of the garage with his bag over his shoulder and the specific, closed expression of a man who had made a decision sometime in the night about how he was going to carry what Friday had left him.

The decision, clearly, was to carry it quietly. The expression was professional. Neutral. The veteran's mask reassembled overnight from whatever the Q2 elimination and the pole position board had done to it after the cameras had gone.

He set his bag down at his side of the engineering station and looked at the overnight data package on his tablet without acknowledging Leo.

Leo looked at him once.

Berg's Sprint Race start was P15. Behind the Q3 field, behind the Q2 survivors who had qualified between P11 and P14, in the mid-pack where races were won by attrition and track position and the specific, grinding experience of a driver who had spent years learning how to move through a crowd.

Berg was good at that. He was not good at what the front of the field required.

Leo looked away.

He didn't say anything.

Berg didn't say anything either.

The space between their two sides of the garage was three metres of empty floor and something that wasn't silence and wasn't conversation and wasn't going to resolve itself before the Sprint Race started.

Elias arrived at 8:20. He went straight to his engineering station and put on his headset and pulled up the morning's data without greeting anyone. He found Leo's eye across the garage and gave him a short, precise nod.

Leo nodded back.

---

At 9:00, the Sprint Race grid walk began.

Leo left the garage with Anya and walked the paddock toward the pit lane exit. The Saturday morning had brought a different energy to Albert Park. Not the building tension of a Friday session where everything was still undecided.

Something more focused. The stands were filling faster than they had on Friday. The crowd had read the headlines. They had seen the timing board. They had come to watch something they didn't yet have words for keep happening.

The paddock walkway was busy.

He moved through it without breaking his pace.

Near the Prema motorhome entrance, he saw Alessandro Rossi.

The Italian was walking toward the pit lane with his engineer and two members of his PR team. He was in his race suit, helmet under his arm, the posture of a man who had processed Friday's result and arrived at a framework for Saturday that restored the familiar confidence of a driver who knew exactly who he was.

He glanced at Leo as they passed.

Not a hostile look. Not the territorial stare of a driver marking his ground. Something more measured than that. The look of someone who had spent the night reviewing data and had found the answers he needed to function in the environment the qualifying session had created.

Then he smiled.

Not warmly or dismissively. The small, specific smile of a driver who knew that the reversed grid had put ten cars between him and the man who had beaten him by three-tenths the previous afternoon and was treating that fact as the gift it was.

Leo held his eye for one second.

Then he looked back at the track ahead.

'He's pleased about the reversed grid,' Leo noted. 'He thinks P10 is a problem. He thinks it gives him the Feature Race setup he needs — let the rookie fight through traffic, let him burn the tyres, let the experience gap show itself across twenty-three laps of a race situation he's never been in.'

He thought about what Rossi didn't know.

He moved on.

---

Rafael Vega was near the ART garage.

The Spaniard was talking to a group of Spanish-language journalists beside the pit lane barrier. He had the easy, practiced energy of a driver in front of cameras — relaxed in the shoulders, making the kind of broad hand gestures that photographed well.

Leo caught the Spanish word for 'mecánico' as he passed, and then a laugh from the journalists, and then Vega's voice rising slightly as he continued.

He didn't stop to find the translation.

He already knew what was being said.

The version that journalists wrote down and social media translated within four minutes was: "He was fast in a straight line on Friday. Let's see what happens when there are twenty-two other cars on track and you're not just chasing a clock. A mechanic can fix a car. That doesn't mean he can race one."

Leo read it on Elias's phone as they passed through the pit lane gate.

He read it once then handed Elias's phone back. He said nothing.

He filed it in the same category as every other piece of information about the session — as data about a competitor's state of mind. Vega was talking because he was unsettled. Unsettled drivers talked. Comfortable ones didn't need to.

The Spaniard had qualified P4. He was starting P7. He was fast enough to be in the conversation at the front of the reversed grid, but he had gone the whole of Friday without finding an answer to Leo's Sector 2 time. He didn't have one now. He was trying to construct one out of words instead.

Leo let it sit.