Formula 1: Infinite Simulation Mode

Leo was already moving before his conscious mind had processed that the lights had gone out.

The launch off the line was clean.

Not the cleanest in the field — he could see through the first corner that three or four cars ahead had gotten off the line quicker, their rear tyres finding traction on the left side of the grid boxes where the rubber had been laid down by the formation lap warm-up. His side of the grid — P10, the right side of the track — had less of that rubber. The tyre had needed an extra tenth to fully load.

He had lost one car length to the pack in the first fifty metres.

He made it back in the next fifty.

The engine produced the specific, raw bark of a power unit being asked for everything at once — not the controlled delivery of a qualifying lap where you wanted the power on early but precisely, but the blunt, maximum output of a race start where precision was secondary to being somewhere other than last into the first corner.

He was not going to be last into the first corner.

He weaved once behind Moreau’s Prema car — not to disrupt the French driver’s tow, but to see the gap forming between Moreau and Alessandro Rossi ahead of him. Both Prema cars were pushing. Both of them had launched well.

Between them and Leo, the three-car gap that had existed at the grid boxes had compressed to one and a half as the closing speed of the first corner approached.

240 kilometres per hour.

Turn 1 in three seconds.

He looked left.

Khalil’s Hitech car was on the outside line — P4 at the start, now carrying too much speed into the Turn 1 entry, the driver committing to a line that would have been fine if the car ahead of him had stayed on trajectory. The car ahead of him had not stayed on trajectory.

Bennett, P5. The ART driver had moved right to take the optimal Turn 1 entry from the outside-in line and in doing so had crossed directly into Khalil’s path.

Khalil hit the brakes.

Not a panic brake. A real one. The Hitech car’s nose dove, the front tyres locking for two tenths of a second — long enough to leave black lines on the Albert Park asphalt, long enough to push the car four metres past its intended braking point, long enough to send it sliding toward the outside of Turn 1 on a line that was now taking it across the racing surface and into the space where three other cars were trying to exist simultaneously.

Leo saw it before it fully happened.

He was already moving.

The gap opened on the inside — not a wide gap, not a comfortable gap. The two-metre channel between Khalil’s sliding Hitech and the white line on the left of the circuit that marked the edge of the track. Tight. Real. The kind of space that looked like a gap on a screen and felt like nothing from inside a cockpit.

He committed to it.

The Arcadia #24 drove through on the inside of Khalil with seventeen centimetres to spare on the right and forty on the left. The turbulence off the Hitech’s rear wing hit his front wing as he went through — the familiar destabilisation, the nose going light for a fraction — and the Racing Instinct made the correction before Leo’s hands consciously formed the instruction.

He came out of Turn 1 ahead of Khalil.

P9.

He was still moving.

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Turn 2 was a short, sharp right-hander that the field always bunched into after the Turn 1 chaos. Not a dramatic overtaking point. A corner that rewarded clean approach lines and punished drivers who had spent too much speed in Turn 1’s carnage.

Ahead, he saw the contact.

Vega and Dubois.

The Spaniard had gone around the outside of the Australian into Turn 2 — the kind of bold, sideways move that looked spectacular and was approximately three times riskier than the inside line. Dubois had covered the inside. Vega had gone outside.

Both of them had arrived at the apex of Turn 2 at the same time, which meant neither of them could use the full width of the track on exit.

The contact was right-rear to left-front. Not a collision. A brush. A nudge at the exit of the corner that sent Vega’s ART car half a metre wide of his intended line and put Dubois’s DAMS car into a brief, correctable moment of oversteer.

Both cars kept going.

But Vega had lost momentum. His exit from Turn 2 was compromised — the trajectory wrong, the car pointing at the outside of the track rather than the racing line for Turn 3. He had to lift. He had to correct. He lost two car lengths in the process.

Leo drove through the gap between them on the inside.

Clean. Controlled. The inside line through Turn 2 that had been available from the moment Dubois moved to cover Vega on the outside — the line nobody had taken because everyone was focused on the battle happening on the other side of the circuit.

He came out of Turn 2 in P7.

Three positions gained. Two corners.

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"Turn 2, clean pass," Elias said immediately. His voice was running at the specific pace of a race engineer whose data feed was showing something that required active management. "P7. Khalil and Vega both behind. Dubois directly ahead. Gap is one-point-two seconds. You have clean air."

Leo drove onto the back straight.

Clean air.

The first time all race that he wasn’t in the specific, pressure-cooked environment of another car’s wake.

The back straight opened up ahead of him and the engine hit its full power band without the turbulence of the cars ahead disrupting the airflow over his front wing and the sudden sensation was of space — physical, real space between himself and the car in front, the kind that allowed the car to work the way it was designed to work rather than the compromised, aero-starved version of itself that lived in someone else’s dirty air.