F1 2020-plaza -

He chose Grand Prix. Bahrain. 100% race distance. No assists.

Three years later, his father found the drive while helping Leo move into his first flat—a real one, near a real job, a quiet engineering role at a composites manufacturer. No racing involved.

Leo double-clicked.

At 4 AM, he saved the replay and closed the laptop. The room was cold. Outside, a single car passed on the wet road—slow, careful, real.

For the next ninety minutes, Leo didn’t exist. His bedroom walls dissolved. The stack of rejection emails from internships blurred into the kerb at Turn 1. His father’s disappointment faded in the rearview mirrors. All that remained was braking points, throttle application, the tremble of the wheel as he rode the kerbs through the final sector. F1 2020-PLAZA

The screen lit up. The cars roared. And for a moment, they both sat in silence, watching a digital Ferrari cut through a virtual sunset on a circuit that had, in the real world, held no race that year.

He didn’t delete it.

No jet engines streaking silver across July sky. No distant thrum of a Grand Prix bleeding through the valley. The circuits were silent tombs of asphalt and tyre marbles. Lockdown had flattened the calendar into a grey spreadsheet of cancellations.