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Marianna POV

Duane wins from P3.

Not P1. He qualifies P3 on Saturday, behind Verstappen and Leclerc, and the general consensus among the paddock—which I am now apparently embedded enough to overhear in real time rather than reading about afterward—is that the Veloce car is fast but not quite fast enough around the banking to challenge from the front.

I treat Luca on Saturday afternoon.

Hip flexors improved, which I choose to interpret as evidence that he did the mobilization work between sim sessions and not as evidence of literally anything else. Then McCartney runs me through Duane's pre-qualifying shoulder assessment data over dinner—she uses a tablet and a small expandable fork she apparently carries everywhere, which is both practical and mildly alarming—and I make three notes in the margin of the printed protocol she hands me, which she reads with her reading glasses on and annotates in turn.

We work well together, McCartney and I. It's an efficient kind of working-well, built on mutual recognition rather than warmth, which suits both of us perfectly.

Race day. Sunday. The North Sea has decided to cooperate, which means the Dutch sky is doing something almost blue, and Zandvoort smells like sand and sunscreen and the particular fried thing they sell at the circuit vendors whose name I can't pronounce but which Oliver described as "conceptually ambitious but texturally rewarding."

Oliver finishes P8. He sends me a voice note from the car after the cool-down lap—I can hear the helmet still on, the sound weirdly muffled and joyful—that says: P8!! Consistently points-scoring!! Tell my hip flexors I said well done!!

I do not tell his hip flexors anything. I am a professional.

Duane wins at lap forty-one.

Not because Verstappen crashes, or Leclerc has an issue, or the safety car reshuffles the field in some fortuitous direction. He wins because on lap thirty-eight he finds a window on the inside of Turn 3 that nobody else has used all weekend, slides through it with a commitment that makes the team radio momentarily incoherent, and drives the next three laps with the calm authority of someone who has already decided how the race ends.

The gap comes down. Two seconds. One-point-seven. One-point-two.

And then—somehow, on a circuit where overtaking is considered approximately as achievable as underwater basket weaving—he's past.

P1.

In the Veloce garage, something happens that I haven't witnessed before. The mechanics—not just a fist-pump this time, not just the collective exhale of controlled professionals—actually cheer. Out loud, unselfconsciously, the way people cheer at things that have earned it. One of them, a woman with red hair and a Veloce Racing radio on her hip, puts both hands in the air.

I'm standing behind the white line. My hands are flat on the barrier.

McCartney appears at my shoulder. "Good result."

"Yes," I say.

She gives me approximately four seconds of that assessment look. Then: "I'll handle the post-race shoulder work. Go watch the podium."

"You don't have to—"

"Reyes." She's already turning away. "Go watch the podium."

So I go watch the podium.

The Dutch fans at Zandvoort during a race they've just watched Verstappen lose are a study in collective emotional management. The orange is everywhere, the dedication undiminished, but the energy has shifted from the anticipatory roar of qualifying into something more nuanced—generous in defeat, capable of acknowledging a thing that was extraordinary even when it wasn't what they wanted.

They cheer for Duane when he stands on the top step. Not full-throated, nothing like what they'd give their countryman, but real. The recognition of something worth recognizing.

He doesn't smile. He holds the trophy and looks out at the circuit and the sea and the tens of thousands of orange-clad people, and his face does the composed thing, the contained thing, the controlled thing.

But I know where to look.

His left hand adjusts the grip on the trophy. Shifts it slightly. And his eyes—for exactly two seconds, scanning the paddock below the podium—find something specific before the camera angle cuts away.

I'm pretty sure he was looking at me.

I'm completely certain I'm not being objective.

The champagne goes up.

Oliver, appearing at my elbow from wherever Alpine keeps their P8 finishers, says: "He looked for you."