The second set of tyres went on in three minutes and forty seconds.

Leo watched from the back of the garage as the engineers did their thing. Pete coordinated the change without raising his voice — four mechanics on the guns, two spotters calling clearance on each corner, one engineer logging the temperatures of the old compound as it came off.

Their work rate was efficient and well practiced. The kind of operation that looked simple because every person involved had done it enough times to remove every unnecessary movement from their own part of it.

The new compound caught the garage light as the final wheel went on. Pale. Unmarked. The full tread depth visible across the surface in clean, parallel grooves.

Leo looked at it the way he had looked at the pod before a ranking session.

One shot. Use everything. Leave nothing in the machine.

"Pressures are set," Pete said, standing from beside the rear-right. "Wing is unchanged. Brake bias at 51.8 as requested."

"Good," Leo said.

He pulled his gloves on. The material tightened across his knuckles.

His forearms still carried the residue of the previous laps. The deep, settled ache of muscles that had been loaded and loaded and loaded again across a session that wasn’t finished. His neck was worse than the forearms.

The accumulated G-force from six hard laps had taken something from the muscles below his skull that they wouldn’t fully give back until tomorrow morning.

He accepted it.

The pod had taught him to race through discomfort. Not to ignore it — ignoring it was how drivers made mistakes. To incorporate it. To factor the fatigue into the framework as a variable, the same way he factored tyre temperature or track evolution.

’Right forearm is at 60 percent capacity. Adjust grip pressure through sustained right-hand corners. Compensate with earlier steering inputs.’

He flexed his right hand once.

Ready enough.

---

"Leo." Anya appeared beside the car, not at the pit wall where she had been standing for most of Q1. Beside the car. Close enough that he could hear her without the radio. "Q2 clock is at nine minutes. Track temperature has dropped another half a degree. The rubber from the early laps is peaking. This is the best the circuit is going to be all session."

He looked at her.

"Six other cars are going out in the next two minutes," she continued. "Rossi is staying in the garage. He’s watching the track temperature data. If it keeps dropping, he’ll go late. He might get a better window than you."

"He won’t," Leo said.

"He has the same data we—"

"He has the numbers," Leo said. "I have what the circuit is doing right now. There’s a difference." He picked up his helmet. "The temperature dropped in the back section and the front section held. The grip is uneven. The middle sector is faster than the model. Rossi’s engineer will see the temperature number and wait. I’m going now."

Anya held his eyes for three seconds.

She stepped back.

"I know," she said. Quietly. Not agreement — something closer to the specific trust that had been building since FP1. The kind that arrived when someone’s instincts had been right enough times in a row that questioning them started to feel like the mistake. "Go."

He climbed in.

---

The pit lane exit was green.

Leo rolled out onto the Albert Park asphalt and the circuit took the weight of the car and the fresh tyres transmitted their cold, stiff feedback through the suspension and into his hands.

He worked through Turn 1 of the out-lap with deliberate loading. Right-front first. Then the left-rear. Then both fronts together through the long sweep after Turn 2. Building the temperature in layers. Not randomly — in the specific sequence that the simulation had shown produced the most even distribution across all four contact patches.

"Fronts at 74," he said at the Turn 6 exit.

"Copy," Elias said. "Rears at 71. You need another 40 seconds."

"I know."

He ran the back section of the circuit at 87 percent pace. Each corner loaded the tyres a fraction more. Each straight let the surface temperature spread from the centre of the tread to the edges.

The Auditory Mapping ran in the background — not searching for anything specific, just listening. Reading the contact patch sound the way a hand reads the surface of something in the dark.

The sounds were good.

Even. Clean. The new compound was responding exactly as the framework predicted.

He came through Turn 14 and the fronts read 86 degrees.

The rears read 83.

Three degrees of differential. One more loading corner would close it to two. Two degrees was inside the optimal window.

He loaded the rear through Turn 15 with a deliberately wider entry — a small sacrifice of corner exit speed that transferred load onto the rear-right and brought its temperature up by two degrees in one corner.

Rears at 85.

He crossed the start-finish line.

The flying lap began.

---

Sector 1.

He hit Turn 1 at 296 kilometres per hour.

Not a number he had planned. A number that arrived because the tyres were in the window and the track was grippy and his hands made the call before the calculation fully formed. He was four metres deeper into the braking zone than his Q2 lap one benchmark.

The car dove.

He felt the G-load arrive like a wall to his face. It felt immediate and total. The harness cut into his chest and his neck went rigid against the force and the world narrowed to the white apex marker coming up fast and the steering wheel in his hands and the sound of the brakes working at the edge of their compound’s heat range.

Leo found the apex.

For a moment he wasn’t certain he had. For one half-second he couldn’t feel the front-right’s position relative to the painted line because the G-load was compressing his sensory feedback and the tyre was at the very edge of what it could generate.