Chapter 105: Saturday; Sprint V
"He ran the optimal tyre window for twenty-eight laps. No one could get close in the final stint."
"Yeah... But, he didn’t have me behind him in Bahrain."
The radio went quiet for a while.
Then Anya, brief and clear: "Don’t underestimate any of them."
"I’m not," Leo said. "I know exactly what each of them can do."
Leo came through Turn 11.
The fronts hit 87 degrees. The rears followed to 85.
The tyre window was open.
He looked at the main straight stretching out ahead as the formation lap came to its end. The grandstands on both sides full. The finish line approach with the grid positions marked on the track surface — painted numbers on the asphalt, each one sitting in its box, waiting.
His box was at the back of the reversed group.
P10.
He saw the number from two hundred metres out and drove toward it at walking pace. Around him, the other cars were pulling into their positions in sequence. The grid was forming. The formation lap was ending.
He rolled into P10 and stopped.
The engine went to idle.
The noise of the circuit compressed into the specific sound of a grid that had arrived at its positions and was now waiting. Not silent. Never silent on a race grid. The engines idling at different rates. The crowd up in the grandstands. The PA system in the distance.
The mechanical sounds of cars settling onto their grid boxes — clicks and ticks and the low vibration of twenty-two combustion engines all running at minimum output.
Leo kept his hands on the wheel.
He looked forward.
Nine cars between him and the circuit. Rows of them. The Invicta livery of M. Rossi at the front. The DAMS blue of Santos. The Hitech white and grey of Nakamura. The ART and Prema cars arranged in the spread of the reversed grid.
His mirrors showed the cars behind him. P11, P12 — the drivers who hadn’t made Q3, starting their own races from further back with their own calculations about how the day would go.
He looked forward again.
Anya’s voice came through once more. Quiet. Just for him.
"Whatever happens in the first corner," she said, "stay clean. We need the car back. The Feature Race is this afternoon."
"I know," he said.
"I mean it, Leo. One incident could—"
"I know," he said again.
He felt the framework running at a level it hadn’t reached all weekend. Not analytical now. Not the layer-by-layer calculation of sector times and tyre windows. Something lower and faster and more total. The Racing Instinct at whatever percentage it had risen to since he had stopped watching the number.
It felt like electricity.
Not the nervous kind. The stored kind. The kind that built in a capacitor over time and waited for the moment the circuit completed.
He looked at the lights gantry above the main straight.
The marshal boards were coming down on both sides. The grid crew was clearing the lane. The cameras were pointing at every car on the grid simultaneously — the broadcast feed cutting between them, building the pre-race package that would go to the international audience in the next ninety seconds.
He was on one of those cameras.
He knew because he could see the broadcast unit positioned at the corner of the P10 box, its lens pointed directly at the Arcadia #24.
He didn’t adjust his posture. Didn’t perform anything. He sat in the car exactly as he had been sitting — hands on the wheel, eyes forward, the balaclava and helmet making every expression invisible.
The lights gantry went dark.
Preparation phase ending.
He took one breath. Slow. Deep. The last deliberate breathing he would do until the first safety car period or the end of the race, whichever came first.
His right foot was on the brake. His left foot was resting against the clutch. The launch sequence was loaded in the dash. The tyres were in the window. The engine was ready.
The first red light appeared on the gantry.
Then the second.
He felt the framework close around the moment the way the pod had closed around its hardest laps — total focus, everything unnecessary gone, the world reduced to the five red lights above the main straight and the nine cars ahead and the circuit waiting beyond them.
Third light.
Fourth.
He didn’t think about Rossi. Didn’t think about Vega or Nakamura or Santos or the reversed grid or the headlines that had been written last night or the Freedom Units sitting at 55 in the system he couldn’t explain to anyone.
He thought about Turn 1.
He thought about what the inside line looked like when nine cars were all trying to reach it at the same time.
He thought about everything the simulation had built for exactly this.
The fifth light went out.
Not one by one on the way down. All five. Simultaneously. The gantry going dark in a single, clean instant that ended the waiting and started everything else.
Leo’s left foot came off the clutch.
The Arcadia #24 launched.
The sensation was different from the pod. The pod had simulated a launch — had generated the appropriate G-load through the seat, had pushed him back against the harness, had done everything a simulation could do to approximate what happened when 620 horsepower found its way through two rear tyres that were at operating temperature and ready to put it all on the ground.
The real thing was not an approximation.
It was a physical event.
The harness cut into his shoulders with a force that felt like two hands grabbing him from behind. His helmet snapped back against the headrest. His vision compressed at the edges.
The world ahead of him — the Albert Park main straight, the twenty-one other cars all doing the same thing at the same time — arrived faster than it had any right to.
He was already moving before his conscious mind had processed that the lights had gone out.