Note: This is a work of fiction. Real public figures appear in entirely fictional scenes, dialogue, and events that never happened.
Neil had been led away from Lucas and the production, up to one of the private Paddock Club suites, and now he sat across from Stefano alone, the circuit spread out below through the glass.
"You didn't bring me up here for the view." He got straight to it. "So let's not dance around it. What is it you want?"
His gut had been sure of this since the man first crossed the floor to find him. Stefano wanted something, and it would be for Lucas, not for Neil. The whole F1 driving arrangement Lucas had walked into on Friday had been this man's doing to begin with. Neil saw no reason to dress up where it was heading.
Stefano took it in stride. "I know you don't think well of me at the moment. I put Lucas in that car, and I understand exactly how that looks to the man responsible for him." He turned his own cup slowly on the table. "But I did not do it carelessly. Every part of that car was prepared, inspected, and made safe before he ever climbed into it. I would not gamble with a man's life. Not for a film, not for the sport, not for anything."
"Making sure he wasn't in danger isn't a kindness, Mr. Domenicali." Neil's voice stayed flat. "It's the least anyone who straps him into a race car owes him. Nobody gets thanked for the bare minimum."
Stefano nodded, taking the hit without arguing it. "Fair enough. And if that is your standard, then I suspect you are going to hate what I came here to put to you."
Neil's brows lifted. "What proposal?"
"Lucas. As the first Global Ambassador in the history of Formula 1. Beginning next year."
That straightened Neil in his chair. Whatever he'd braced for, it hadn't been that. This wasn't another endorsement or a magazine cover. This was the biggest thing to land on Lucas's desk since the World Cup, and Neil knew it the moment the words settled.
"I'll be plain with you, since you clearly prefer it that way," Stefano went on. "You already know the figure we put on the table. And I am prepared to go well past it, considerably past it, if Lucas agrees to a few things we would want from him in return."
"And what things would those be?"
Stefano let a beat pass. "We would want to present him the way no ambassador has ever been presented. Not from behind a podium. We would want him to drive out in front of the world in a real F1 car." He held Neil's eye. "With far less holding it back than the one he drove on Friday. Close to the genuine machine."
Neil was on his feet before the sentence had finished landing. "No. Out of the question. If that's the condition, we'll walk away from the entire thing before I let you put him in a car like that—"
"Please. One moment, Mr. Lamb." Stefano lifted a hand, calm against the heat coming back at him. "From what I saw on Friday, I am confident Lucas can handle it. More than confident."
"From what you saw." Neil didn't sit back down. "No. It's too dangerous, and that's where it ends. We can't let him do it. It's too much to ask of anybody."
Stefano had expected nothing softer, and he didn't shove against it. He simply laid out what they would put in place regardless. A medical team standing by at the trackside. The car held to firm limits no matter how it looked. The circuit closed and under full control with no one else on it. Lewis and Max taking it out first to be certain of it, exactly as they had two days earlier. Every safeguard the sport knew how to build, built around one car.
Neil heard all of it and shook his head.
"Safe." He said the word back like it had a bad taste. "You can plan for every last thing and life still does whatever it pleases. One detail you didn't see coming and it's over. So, no."
Stefano sat with that, and for a moment he looked worn. He had known this wall was waiting for him.
"Then let me ask you one thing." He opened his hands. "What if we put it to Lucas himself? Let the man make his own choice."
Neil stopped.
That was the whole trouble. He knew Lucas. He knew, with a sinking sort of certainty, that there was every chance the man would say yes, because saying yes to precisely this kind of thing was stitched into him. He shook his head again, slower now.
But Stefano kept at it, near to pleading, and would not let the thing go.
In the end Neil gave that much ground. He would take it to Lucas. Not because he wanted to, but because keeping it from him was the one move he wouldn't make.
Whatever else lay between the two of them, he and Lucas ran on the same rule. Everything on the table, always. No handling the man by quietly deciding what he was allowed to know.
---
"They're serious about this?" Lucas turned it over, a little thrown. "An actual F1 car?"
"Completely serious. They were impressed by Friday, more than I think you realize." Neil dropped into the seat across from him. "And look, I get the appeal. I do. But it's too dangerous, Lucas, full stop. So before that look settles on your face, think about your wife. Think about your daughter." He caught himself and amended it. "No. Your three daughters."
The number caught up to him even as he said it. Daciana was a Knight now, signed and finalized. And Daria, her sister, was nearly there, the paperwork all but through. Three girls who'd be waiting at home no matter what Lucas decided to go prove on a racetrack.
Lucas went quiet, weighing it properly, longer than Neil had braced for.
Then he spoke. "Here's the thing, Neil." He met his manager's eye. "Driving a real F1 car, even close to full power, isn't beyond me. I can handle it. I know I can."
Neil's face said he'd known that answer was coming from the second he walked in.
"But..." Lucas wasn't done. A different note slid into his voice, lighter and sharper at once. "Can they actually afford me? Asking a man to do something that dangerous doesn't come cheap. Not where I'm concerned."
Neil let out a wry breath. For a moment he'd forgotten who he was sitting across from.
Not only an actor with a reckless streak, but a man carrying an entire foundation on his back, one kept running mostly out of his own pocket no matter how many sponsors put their names to it.
"Oh, you leave that part to me." Neil's mouth twitched, the worry making room for something more familiar. "If you're truly set on this, then I'll put a number on it big enough to make Domenicali sweat clean through that nice suit. High enough that they have to ask themselves how badly they really want it." He spread his hands. "If they balk, we walk, and you never go near that car. And if they actually pay it." A short, dry beat. "Then they've overpaid for the privilege, and that's their problem, not ours."
---
Neil met Stefano again later, and this time the CEO hadn't come alone. Seated alongside him were several of Formula 1's senior executives, brought in for the proposal itself, the people whose names an arrangement this size would need.
Neil took his seat, and he said his piece.
The room changed the moment the number left his mouth.
Stefano and the executives around him went still, then traded glances down the length of the table. Whatever they'd walked in braced for, Neil had cleared it by a wide margin. The figure he'd put on Lucas was enormous, the kind that made men who moved hundreds of millions for a living stop and quietly ask themselves whether anything could be worth it.
He had asked them to take the ambassador package already on the table and build on top of it. A premium for the single drive of a hundred and fifty million dollars on its own. Full indemnity written against every outcome anyone in the room could imagine.
The whole arrangement pushed past a quarter of a billion dollars. For one man. For, when it came down to it, a single lap in front of a crowd.
It was a ridiculous thing to ask, and Neil knew it. He'd built it that way on purpose.
Even an institution as bottomless as the World Cup wouldn't set fire to money like that on a whim, wouldn't pay a fortune simply to drop a famous face into the middle of the actual tournament and call it a show. What F1 wanted from Lucas was that exact brand of madness, a celebrity at the wheel of a real car at a real Grand Prix, and Neil had priced it to match.
Every head at the table turned to the one man who could actually make the call.
Stefano sat with it, his jaw set, and when he finally spoke it was careful and gave nothing away. "We'll review it. We will take this away and consider it properly before we come back to you with anything."
Neil read the room and felt something loosen in his chest, close to relief. They were going to balk. A number like that, against a risk like that, and no committee on earth puts its signature to it in a hurry.
He had built the ask to be turned down, and by the look of the table it would do its job.
Stefano, for his part, had come into the room knowing the deal would be expensive. Lucas was never going to be cheap. This had simply run past even his own braced expectations, and run well past them.
And yet, sitting with it, he couldn't make himself call the number unfair. That was the part that gnawed at him. Lucas Knight was worth it. The man simply was. Whether Formula 1 could bring itself to actually pay what he was worth was the only question left, and Stefano didn't have the answer to it yet.
---
Through all of it, the production knew nothing.
The talks between Lucas, Neil, and Formula 1 stayed sealed off from the film entirely. The cast and crew only worked, day after day, and Lucas and Brad grew closer through the grind of it, the friendship between them settling into something easy and real.
From Mexico, the circus moved on.
The next stop was São Paulo, the Brazilian Grand Prix at Interlagos, and the production dug in for the same three-day stretch they'd run in Mexico.
Interlagos handed them everything Mexico hadn't, a tight, old-school circuit boxed in by some of the most passionate crowds in the sport, and the footage they pulled out of it had a rawness the team couldn't stop talking about.
From there it was Las Vegas, and a Grand Prix that looked like nothing else on the calendar.
A street race run at night straight down the Strip, the lights of the city doing the work no set ever could, the cars tearing past the casinos under a black desert sky.
For a production hunting spectacle, it was a gift dropped into their laps. Lucas and Brad ran their scenes with the neon smeared across the bodywork, and even the crew who'd seen it all stopped what they were doing to watch.
And then, at last, Abu Dhabi.
The Yas Marina Circuit, the final round of the year, the place where the season came to rest. The light over the track bled from afternoon into a floodlit dusk as the race ran down the end of the 2023 campaign, a season Max Verstappen had long since made his own, the title settled weeks before he ever set foot here.
For the production it carried more weight than any round they'd shot.
They had only joined the championship at its back end, picking it up in Austin and chasing it through these closing rounds, but the film's story had always been built to finish here.
The climax was written around this very race, the fictional season ending the way the real one did, and so the last of the principal photography came to rest under the same lights.
When the cameras finally stopped, it landed on everyone at once. The training at Thermal, the weeks at Willow Springs, then Austin and everything that had come after it, all of it ending here on a circuit by the water.
What followed bled into one long night, part film wrap, part end-of-season send-off, the two worlds folding into each other.
The cast and crew, the drivers who'd spent these last few rounds half-living inside the production, the teams winding down from a hard year, all of it ran into one celebration under the Abu Dhabi sky. Verstappen, Hamilton, the rest of the grid, drifting between the closing of a championship and the closing of a film, and Lucas and Brad in the middle of it.
The two of them had walked into this months ago as outsiders, a pair of actors borrowing a world that wasn't theirs.
They walked out of it as something nearer to family.
The drivers who'd eyed the dressed-up APXGP garage with open suspicion back in Austin were the same ones now knocking glasses with the men who'd played them.
Brad, who had spent that first weekend feeling like a fraud beside the genuine article, looked like he belonged. And Lucas stood at the heart of the room the way he always seemed to, all the doubt that had trailed him since Austin long since burned off, the racing world having quietly decided he was one of theirs.
Before they left the desert, there was one last duty to see to.
Lucas and Brad sat a joint press session with Formula 1, the two of them side by side in front of the cameras, fielding the questions the paddock had been saving up for weeks. What it had felt like out there.
Whether the rumors about Lucas and the sport held any water. The two of them played off each other the way they did everywhere by now, easy and quick, Brad content to let Lucas take the heat and Lucas content to take it.
Then it was done, and they flew home, back to the States.
For most of the cast, that was the work finished, bar whatever pickups the edit might call for.
Not for Lucas.
He had offered to write original music for it, songs to sit under the racing and carry the picture where a score alone wouldn't reach. Nobody on the production blinked at it.
By now it was well known across the industry that Lucas tended to do this, lending his own originals to the films he took on; he was a genuine artist on top of everything else, and the offer was nothing out of the ordinary coming from him.
And the tracks he turned in were good enough that word traveled fast. Joseph couldn't stop talking about them, and the people at Apple were just as taken, certain they had something special on their hands for the film.
What none of them knew was that none of it was his. The songs came from the life he'd lived in another world, music that had never been written in this one, and he'd only had to set it down and put his name to it. It fit F1 The Movie perfectly, the way everything he carried over tended to.
That work could keep a few days, though. For now, with the season behind him and the shoot behind him, Lucas finally went home, to the quiet of the house in Bel Air.
---
Lucas had been away from his family for the better part of two and a half months. Stepping back through his own front door after all that time did something no amount of rest could. It lifted a weariness out of him that had settled bone-deep across the shoot.
That weariness had a source, and Lucas understood it better than anyone around him ever could.
With the film wrapped, the **[Mind Workshop]** had quietly closed the book on the role.
Holding a professional driver's body and reflexes in place for two and a half months had run the ability far past where it normally sat, driving it well into overwork to sustain everything the part demanded of him.
Now that it had let go, the strain it had been quietly carrying all that time landed on Lucas at once, and his body finally allowed itself to feel every bit of it.
What didn't leave him were the abilities. Those, he kept.
They sat in his mind now, named and his to call on.
[Racer's Physique]
[Apex Precision]
[Racing Instinct]
[Mechanical Sympathy]
[Wheel-to-Wheel Combat]
That was the part that caught his attention. He could see them spelled out plainly, each one its own line, and that didn't happen for nothing.
It meant the [Mind Workshop] had been worked to its very edge by this role, stretched further than most before it. Driving was no small thing to build into a body.
Racing at the level the part had demanded was harder still, the kind of skill ordinary people chased the better part of a lifetime and never quite caught.
It was one of the quieter reasons he'd taken Stefano up on the car. An ability this rare and this hard-won was a thing a man would be a fool to let rust.
The racing abilities he gained aside, he also remembered the car that was supposed to be his now. But it seemed it hadn't been delivered just yet.
A car like that didn't show up at your door. It would have to be crated and shipped across an ocean once the season was fully wrapped, cleared through customs, and signed over to him before he could so much as touch it.
And even then, you didn't fire up an F1 car and run to the store in it. He'd need a proper circuit for that, a private day at a track booked well ahead. Weeks out, at least. Likely longer than that.
All of it drifted off like a bubble the moment he was properly inside, because his family was there, waiting on him.
Jennifer reached him first and wrapped around him, holding on, pressing close in a dozen small ways at once. "Welcome home, darling." She drew back just far enough to look at him, reading the tiredness sitting around his eyes. "Two and a half months. Look at the state of you. You work yourself half to death, you know that? I want you rested now, properly, for a good long while."
Lucas smiled, warm clean through. "I stopped feeling tired the second you did that."
"Then I'll keep hold of you as long as you like." Jennifer smiled up at him.
"I'll never get tired of it," he said.
A small voice cut in then, demanding its own share of him. "Papa!"
Lucas looked down, and there she was. Seraphina, two years old now and up on her own two feet, toddling toward him with both arms out. He was crouched before he'd even thought about it, scooping her up off the floor. "Oh, there's my baby girl. Look at you. You've grown so much, and I was only gone a couple of months."
Sera giggled and grabbed a fistful of his collar.
Behind them, hanging back, were the other two. Daciana and Daria stood half-tucked close to Jennifer, watching him with a shyness that hadn't been there when he left.
Two and a half months was nothing to a grown man. To children their age it stretched into something near forever, long enough for a face to drift toward the edge of familiar, and Lucas felt the small ache of it even as he understood it completely.
So he didn't rush them. He lowered himself down to their height, Sera still settled on his hip, and let his voice go soft.
"Hey, you two. I missed you both. Every single day I was gone."
For a moment neither girl moved. He held out his free hand, not reaching for them, only offering it. Then Daciana, the braver of the pair, took one small step in, and Daria followed her sister the way she always did, and the distance those long months had opened up between them began, slowly, to close.