The fans in the grandstand could not believe what they were seeing. The two actors were holding their own out there, threading the same corners as the professionals and not looking out of place doing it.
The session was nominally non-competitive, a warm-up the racers treated as little more than a rolling stretch of the legs. Even so, watching two A-listers keep pace with a grid of real F1 drivers was something nobody in the stands had braced for.
Even the hardcore fans had to give it up.
A middle-aged man worked his way through a bag of chips, eyes never leaving the track. "I'll be straight with you, I didn't think Lucas Knight and Brad Pitt could pull this off. Figured it'd all be camera tricks. But they're out there really moving, and it looks like the real thing."
The friend beside him nodded. "Right? I had it in my head the racers would crawl around for the movie people, let the actors look good. They're not. They're flat out. And that's actually Lucas and Brad in those cars, by the way. No stunt guys, no doubles. I watched them climb in myself."
"Hmm." The man chewed, nodding.
Not everyone in the row was so easily won over.
A few seats down sat a man more invested in the sport than the spectacle, red hair, arms crossed tight over his team shirt. He'd been listening with a sour twist to his mouth, and at last he leaned in.
"What's so impressive about any of it?" His voice cut across them, flat and dismissive. "They've got some easy little toy car under them, and the racers aren't even pushing. Anybody could look good in that."
The middle-aged man and his blond friend both turned to him.
The middle-aged man frowned. "Not impressive? Did you actually look into what they're driving? It's not an F1 car, fine. But I read it's a real F2 under all that bodywork."
"Yeah," the friend said. "Pretty wild, honestly."
The red-haired man wasn't moved. "An F2. So what. Those aren't even hard to drive."
"Are you listening to yourself?" The middle-aged man's voice climbed. "An F2 would put a normal person in the barrier on the first lap. What, you'd hop in and just figure it out? You think you're better than everyone out there?"
The friend cut in. "From what I read, there's nothing in an F2 to make it easy. No power steering, downforce that wrecks your neck after a few laps, and the thing's on a knife edge at speed. Stick a regular guy in one and he's in the wall before the first corner. These two are driving it like it's a rental."
The fans nearby murmured their agreement.
The red-haired man knew it too, somewhere under the bluster. He just had no intention of saying so. "Whatever." He waved a hand at the track as if brushing the whole thing away. "I don't care what's bolted under the floor. A pair of movie stars plays dress-up for one weekend and you're all ready to hand them a trophy. Makes me sick. Knight worst of all, strolling in here like the whole paddock should fall over itself thanking him for showing up. I can't stand either of them."
The middle-aged man traded a look with his friend and let it drop. There was no winning it; they might as well have been arguing with the grandstand railing.
Then the red-haired man barked out a laugh and stabbed a finger toward the track.
They followed it. One of the APXGP cars, the fictional eleventh team, had run wide and slewed off the racing line, the back end stepping out before the driver gathered it back up.
"That Lucas?" The red-haired man was grinning now. "Ha. What an idiot."
The middle-aged man shook his head, watching the car settle. "No. That's Brad's." He nodded toward the front of the pack. "Lucas is still up there. Still clean."
The red-haired man went quiet, though the snickering didn't fully stop, his and a few others around him.
---
Out on the circuit, the run wound through its final laps and came to an end.
The cars peeled into the pit complex one after another and fell silent. Brad climbed out of his and pulled the helmet free, and the embarrassment was written all over him before he'd said a word.
Lucas crossed to him.
Brad let out a long breath. "God, that was humiliating. The track just would not come to me out there. All those weeks at Willow Springs and I go and choke the one time it's on camera." The worst of it sat underneath the words. He'd done it with the real drivers watching, the men whose work he was there to stand in for.
"Hey. It's fine." Lucas set a hand on his shoulder. "Half of that ends up on the cutting room floor anyway. It won't touch the production. You drove well, Brad. The prep showed."
"Thanks." Brad managed a thin smile. Then he shook his head, something close to awe creeping in. "You, though. You're a beast, man. I watched you out there. You drove that thing like you'd memorized every inch of this place."
"Maybe." Lucas said it lightly and left it there. The truth was not something he could hand over. In the [Mind Workshop] he had already driven this circuit, lap after lap, long before he ever set foot in Austin. 'Closer to the truth than he knows.'
Then movement pulled both their heads around. Max and a cluster of the other drivers were crossing toward the APXGP box.
Brad straightened, and the tension came right back into him; he was already bracing for the verdict, certain it would be a bad one.
It wasn't.
"Incredible work, both of you." Max stopped in front of them, looking them over with something he didn't hand out often. "I did not expect that. Not even close. You especially, Lucas. There were a few corners out there I forgot you weren't one of us."
Lucas smiled. "Coming from you, that means a lot. Thank you."
Max clapped him on the shoulder. "We should get a drink sometime. I've got plenty to tell you about these cars, if you want to hear it." He let it sit a second. "You interested?"
"You sure you want to open that door?" Lucas's eyes glinted. "I'll have a hundred questions for you. I've gotten a little obsessed with cars lately."
A faint smile from Max. "Try me." He shifted his attention to Brad. "You did good too, Mr. Pitt. Same offer stands. You want in on it, talking cars with Lucas?"
Brad took a second; the embarrassment was finally loosening its grip. "Yeah. When I've got the time, let's do it."
Max laughed, easy and warm, and the other drivers filled in around them, each one finding his own version of the same thing to tell the two actors.
For all that Brad had bobbled a corner out there, the verdict in the paddock had landed, and it was the one that counted. The drivers were taking them seriously now. They had decided these two were fit to carry their profession onto a screen the whole world would be watching.
The fictional eleventh team had become real to the men who did this for a living.
And not only to them. Up in the grandstand, the same thing had taken hold across most of the crowd.
All but a bitter few.
---
With the run behind them, Lucas and Brad drifted over to Joseph and the bank of monitors to see what the cameras had pulled in.
There was a flood of it. The drones and the chase cars had tracked them corner by corner from the outside, and inside the two machines the sixteen onboards had caught the rest; the road pouring over the nose, the wheel working under their hands, their own faces behind the visors.
Joseph had all of it up on the screens, still raw and untouched by any editor, and it already had teeth. Even the two men who'd just lived it found themselves leaning in. On the monitors it read fast, faster than it had felt inside the helmet, the cars packed close and the corners coming up hard, the whole thing tight and loud, alive in a way the helmet had flattened out.
Joseph kept shaking his head at it. The practice had bought this. The weeks at Willow Springs were the only reason two actors could sit in among real drivers and have the camera believe every frame of it.
Lewis came by on a break, helmet off, and leaned over Joseph's shoulder for a quick look. Whatever he'd braced himself to find, the footage cleared it.
"This is better than I had in my head, honestly." He watched a corner unspool across the monitor. "It's good. You two went past what I was expecting."
It was nowhere near the speed of a true F1 lap, and it didn't need to be. What sold it was the pair of them inside the cockpits, jaws set, every line of their bodies playing a man with the race of his life pressing down on him.
Convincing as hell.
The next day they ran it again, this time in the qualifying window, the two of them acting it out as though the result meant everything.
And this time the professionals didn't make the mistake of the day before. Nobody wrote the actors off. They put it all in, or made it look that way, which was the whole point; a field of drivers leaning hard turned the footage tense in a manner no amount of staging could fake. Not flat out, not really. Just enough show to set the screen alight.
With that, the Austin shoot was done. The Grand Prix scenes the production had built the entire weekend around were in the can.
Before the circus packed up, one more man got his moment.
Shawn, Lucas's driver and an F1 diehard long before any of this, wasn't about to let the chance slip past him. He worked his way through the paddock and met the drivers one by one, saving the best for last. When he finally got in front of Max Verstappen, his favorite of the lot, the composed professional who ferried Lucas around the world all but turned into a kid at a meet-and-greet. Lucas watched it from a few steps off and let him have it; the man had earned a story to tell.
...
Then came a gap in the schedule. The next block of filming was set for the following Grand Prix, the Mexico City round, still several days out.
For a stretch, the racers had room to breathe. So did the cast.
There was a thing about this film that set it apart from any other. It lived inside the real sport.
They shot at the actual Grands Prix, in the actual paddock, between the actual sessions, and the upshot was that the professional drivers had folded into the production almost without meaning to. It started to feel as if they were part of the movie themselves.
Which made the downtime a gift. The cast, and the crew right alongside them, got a look behind the curtain of the F1 teams that almost nobody outside the sport ever sees, and the chance to know the drivers as people rather than helmets. Max Verstappen, Charles Leclerc, Carlos Sainz, Lando Norris, even Fernando Alonso drifting through with a sharp word on everything.
For Lucas and Brad it was a way deeper into the world they were pretending to belong to. Their co-stars caught the bug too; Kerry and Javier were soon trading questions with engineers and loitering around the garages between setups.
And being this deep inside the sport only sharpened something Lucas had already been turning over for a while.
Owning a team wasn't a new thought for him. It had been sitting at the back of his mind since the ambassador talks, when he'd first read his way into the sport and decided a piece of it was something he wanted eventually.
He'd told himself there was no rush; the ambassador role would smooth the path first, the relationships and the access doing the groundwork before any checkbook came out.
But now he was in the paddock, watching how the teams actually ran from a few feet away, and the someday version of it had started to feel a good deal more concrete. An F2 outfit to learn on, maybe, or a stake in something already on the grid.
The idea only gathered weight as the days in the lull stretched on, and all the more as the drink Max had promised crept up the calendar.
It was Lewis who put the night together, in the end. With Mexico still the better part of a week out and everyone idling between rounds, he'd reached out and floated the idea of getting the four of them out for a few hours, somewhere quiet, while they had the downtime to spare. Max's promised drink folded neatly into it.
They ended up at a low-lit place well off the race-week noise, a back corner the staff cleared the second they clocked who'd walked in. Lucas, Brad, Max, and Lewis, a round on the table and not one word of it about anything but cars.
Max and Lewis carried most of it, pulling back the curtain on the parts of the sport the broadcasts never showed. The politics. The money nobody mentioned on camera. The way a championship got half-decided in a wind tunnel in February, long before a car turned a wheel in anger.
Lucas took it all in, and somewhere in the middle of it he set his glass down and said the thing he'd been circling all night.
"I know how this is going to sound." He looked between the three of them. "But is it even possible for someone like me to start an F1 team? Or buy one outright?"
He pressed on before the laugh he could feel coming had a chance to arrive. "I know how ambitious that is. But hear me out, because it isn't only a whim. There's a real business case under it. A team is a rolling billboard. My companies get their name on a car that's in front of hundreds of millions of people every weekend, on every broadcast on the planet. You can't buy that kind of exposure any other way."
He turned the glass a slow quarter. "And then there's the Foundation side, which if I'm honest matters to me more than any of that. Motorsport's a closed world. If you weren't born near it or rich enough to buy your kid a kart at six, you never get within a mile of it, no matter how much talent's sitting there going to waste. I'd want to change that. Run a proper pipeline through the LK Foundation. Scholarships, karting, engineering placements, then feed those kids straight into a team that's actually mine. Get one or two of them onto a grid one day. That's the part I keep coming back to."
A quiet dropped over the table. Brad, Max, Lewis, none of them said anything. They just looked at him.
Lewis answered first, after a beat of just sitting with it.
"Okay. So. The money's not the problem." He waved it off the table. "You've got the money, that part's obvious. Everyone in here knows what you're worth. That's not the bit that's hard."
"It's everything around the money," Max said.
"It's everything around the money."
Max tipped back in his chair. "Half the time the thing isn't even for sale. Ten teams, that's the entire list, and the people sitting on them aren't putting a sign in the window. You can wave whatever number you like. Doesn't mean anyone's standing up to take it."
"And don't build your own," Lewis said.
"God, no. Don't do that."
"Everyone thinks that's the move. Rich man starts the eleventh team." Lewis shook his head. "It's the worst one there is. They'll charge you a fortune just to let you onto the grid, before you've spent a penny on a car, and they do it on purpose. The whole point's to make it not worth your while."
"Keeps the new guy out. So they keep doing it." Max shrugged, like there was nothing more to say about it.
Lucas turned his glass. "So what would you do."
"Go lower." Lewis didn't hesitate. "F2. F3, even. Tiny fraction of the cost, and it's where everyone on this grid actually came up anyway. Him, me, all of us. That Foundation thing you were talking about, the kids, the pipeline, none of that lives up here. It lives down there." He let it sit a second. "Start there. Get it right. Then come and bother me about the top."
Max said nothing for a moment, working a label off his bottle with his thumb. When he spoke he didn't quite look up.
"And, look. If you want one badly enough, in the end, you'll get one. I'm not going to sit here and tell you the door's shut, because for you it isn't. It's shut for everybody else. Not you." He glanced over. "And it's not only the money. You can actually drive, that's the thing. I told you as much out there and I meant it. I watched the onboards same as everyone else. Nobody was carrying you."
"Which counts for more than people think, in here," Lewis added.
"It counts for a lot." Max nodded. "Money gets you a meeting. The driving's what makes them stop laughing once you're in the room."
"There's the ambassador thing as well." Lewis dropped it in like it had only just surfaced. "Whatever's going on with that."
Max made a noise. "Nobody's confirmed it."
"Nobody's denied it, either. Eighty million, isn't it, the number going round." He looked at Lucas, half a question.
Lucas only lifted a shoulder and let it lie.
"Right." Max read the non-answer for exactly what it was. "So your name's going on the whole sport by next year, near enough. At that point you're not some outsider trying to get a foot in the door. You're halfway through it already. Makes the rest of this a much shorter climb." He spread his hands. "That's all I'm saying."
Lucas sat with all of it, turning the glass slowly, the shape of something settling behind his eyes. He wasn't being entertained anymore. He was doing the math.
Brad, quiet through the heavy part, leaned back with a low whistle. "See, this is the part that scares me. He's actually listening. I've seen that exact look on him a couple of times now. It usually ends with somebody signing something with a frightening number of zeros on it."
Lucas huffed a laugh. "Nothing's signed."
"Yet," Brad said, and let it sit there.