"Traffic building near Turn 1," Elias said. "Three cars are on out-laps. Dubois is on a push. Vega is starting his second run."

"How long does Rossi have?"

"He’s leaving the pit lane now. His out-lap puts his flying lap starting with about two minutes forty on the clock."

Leo did the arithmetic.

’Two minutes forty is enough. He’ll run one clean lap. He has the time.’

He came through Turn 14 and caught sight of Rafael Vega’s ART car ahead of him — the Spaniard on a hot lap, the ART’s rear stepping on the exit of the corner and then snapping back into line with the mechanical abruptness of a car that was at the edge of its rear tyre’s operating window.

Vega was pushing hard. His second run had the urgency of a driver who had seen the timing board and understood that the gap between P5 and P8 had closed while he was in the pits.

Leo watched the ART’s exit line.

Vega was running wide again. The same habit as FP1. The rear stepping under throttle, the driver correcting with a flick of opposite lock that looked fast from the grandstands and bled exit speed in a way the telemetry would confirm later.

The Spaniard was aggressive and the aggression was costing him two-tenths at every corner exit in Sector 2.

’He’ll finish P5 or P6,’ Leo thought. ’He won’t understand why until someone shows him the data.’

He let Vega pull away and watched the ART disappear toward Turn 15.

---

The minor incident happened without warning.

Enzo Leclerc’s Invicta car came through the Turn 11 complex at the far end of the circuit — Leo saw it on the screen on the bridge above the track — and the rear stepped out sharply on the entry.

This was not a snap but a slow, progressive slide that a driver with Leclerc’s experience should have caught in the first three-tenths of a second.

He didn’t catch it.

The Invicta went wide. The left-rear clipped the inside kerb at an angle it wasn’t designed to take, and the car bounced — once, hard, the body pitching sideways before settling — and slid across the run-off area with the front wing scraping a groove in the painted tarmac.

Not a crash or a barrier impact, but real damage.

The front wing endplate came off on the right side, tumbling across the run-off in two pieces before coming to rest against the tyre barrier. The yellow flag board appeared immediately at the marshal’s post. Two hundred metres behind it, a second flag went up.

Leclerc’s Invicta limped back onto the circuit. The car was driving — the front suspension was intact, the monocoque was clean, the driver moved his hands on the wheel and the response was there — but the aerodynamic balance had shifted.

Without the right-side endplate, the front wing was generating uneven downforce and the car was pulling left on straights and understeering on right-hand corners.

Leclerc came over the radio to his engineer.

His words were inaudible to Leo. But his pace told the story. He had gone from a potential P11 time to a crawl through the sector.

"Yellow sectors in 11 and 12," Elias said. "Leclerc is okay. No red flag. Minor debris on the run-off."

"Understood," Leo said.

He was already past the yellow zone and back on the main circuit.

---

The session clock read: Q1 — 2:51 remaining.

Rossi’s out-lap was halfway done.

On the other side of the circuit, the field had compressed into a final, frantic scramble. The drivers sitting between P10 and P18 on the board were all either on hot laps or beginning their final out-laps. The gap between safe qualification and elimination was four-tenths of a second and it was moving every thirty seconds as new times came in.

Leo turned onto the main straight and looked at the pit wall.

Anya was there. Standing. Not checking her tablet. Just watching the timing board on the screen above the pit lane with the particular stillness of someone who had decided that everything possible had been done and all that was left was to watch it unfold.

He rolled past at reduced speed.

She didn’t look at the car. She was looking at the screen.

He looked at it too.

---

The board updated as he crossed the pit lane entry.

1. A. Rossi (Prema) — ’on push lap’

2. L. Kaito (Arcadia) — 1:27.8★

3. T. Moreau (Prema) — 1:28.3

4. O. Dubois (DAMS) — 1:28.6

5. R. Vega (ART) — 1:28.7

6. L. Bennett (ART) — 1:28.8

7. K. Nakamura (Hitech) — 1:29.0

8. J. Khalil (Hitech) — 1:29.1

9. F. Santos (DAMS) — 1:29.2

10. M. Rossi (Invicta) — 1:29.3

11. N. Eriksson (MP) — 1:29.4

12. D. Morales (MP) — 1:29.5

13. R. Kumar (Campos) — 1:29.6

14. E. Leclerc (Invicta) — 1:29.7 (damage)

15. M. Berg (Arcadia) — 1:29.8

---

16. A. Haddad (Trident) — 1:29.9

17. C. Rivera (Campos) — 1:30.1

18. F. Hartmann (VAR) — 1:30.2

19. L. O’Connor (VAR) — 1:30.4 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

20. L. Moretti (Trident) — 1:30.6

21. V. Moreau (AIX) — 1:30.9

22. Z. Wei (AIX) — 1:31.2

---

The cut line sat between P15 and P16.

Berg was P15. One-tenth above elimination. The gap to Haddad below him was nine-hundredths of a second. Nine-hundredths.

On a circuit where tyre temperature alone could shift lap times by four-tenths, nine-hundredths was not a buffer. It was a margin that one corner could erase.

Leo looked at his teammate’s name.

P15. One-tenth from going home.

Leo was literally keeping Arcadia alive in this race. But he felt nothing specific toward Berg. No feeling of contempt or sympathy. He noted it the way he noted a rival’s tyre data — as information about the state of the field.

Berg had pushed too hard in Sector 1 and bled the lap through Sector 2 exactly the way Leo had predicted in the garage.

The lap had no shape. The number at the end of it was the result of a driver who had chased something without a framework for where to find it.