For Jimmy, just getting through the doors of the Sakhir Tower had already been more than he'd come expecting.
He and his team had flown to Bahrain hoping, at the very most, to catch Lucas for the video they wanted to make. They hadn't counted on any of it actually landing. So when a staffer approached out of nowhere and told them they were welcome up in the tower, that alone felt like the whole trip paying off. Being inside was the win. Meeting the man himself wasn't something they'd let themselves bank on.
Then, while they were still finding their feet up there, a second word came down: Lucas wanted them in his room.
That one they hadn't seen coming at all.
They weren't the only ones, either. Somewhere along the way Jimmy had clocked the other name sharing the invite: IShowSpeed, about the biggest thing the new-generation internet had going.
"Chat. CHAT. Big W for this man right here." Darren played straight to the lens, his cameraman tracking him step for step, as he threw a finger toward the staffer who'd walked them all the way from the grandstand up into the tower, a composed man named Isa. "He pulled some strings and got us into the Shakir Tower or whatever, AND we're about to meet Lucas. We up, chat. We up."
Isa's mouth twitched at the mangled name, but he let it slide.
"It's Sakhir Tower, by the way. You keep butchering the name," Jimmy offered, keeping it light.
"Did I?" Speed didn't miss a beat, and the camera swung with him. "Anyway, chat, this right here is MrBeast. Got invited same as me. That's right. We're the VIPs today."
"..." Jimmy had nothing for that. The sheer volume of free will the kid was running on left him somewhere between impressed and speechless.
Whatever chance they had of being up here at all, though, traced back to the older man walking a few steps ahead, the one who'd smoothed the whole thing over with security without so much as breaking stride.
They had no idea who he was. Only that he was clearly somebody.
Speed, for his part, chatted at the man like he was a neighbor's grandfather leaning over a fence, not softening his tone by a single notch.
Isa was quietly sweating through his shirt over it. Because the "grandpa" was Stefano Domenicali. The CEO of Formula 1.
He'd opened his mouth once to introduce him properly, but Stefano caught his eye and gave the faintest shake of his head, something amused flickering behind it. So Isa swallowed the words and said nothing.
What the pair never noticed was that Stefano was studying them right back. Internet celebrities, that was the phrase. He had a rough sense of them; the younger ones in his own family treated these two like royalty, and that, more than anything, was why he'd waved them up into the tower to begin with: a small curiosity, a chance to see what all the fuss was about. What he hadn't counted on was Lucas inviting them himself.
And out of everyone clamoring at the gates below, Lucas had chosen only these two. That alone made Stefano more curious than he'd been all morning.
A few more turns and they reached the door.
Isa's voice smoothed back into formality. "Mr. Knight. Jimmy and the kid streamer are here."
Simon, planted at the threshold, ran his eyes across the group.
Jimmy and Darren had each brought their own bodyguard, and set beside Simon's frame, both men lost some of their edge. Darren's in particular looked distinctly ordinary next to the one filling the doorway.
Simon's gaze passed over the pair of guards. "They wait out here."
Jimmy traded a glance with Darren, then each looked to his own man. A beat, a shrug. They let it go. This was Lucas; whatever waited on the other side of that door, harm wasn't on the menu.
Once that was understood, Simon stepped aside and opened it.
They'd walked in expecting Lucas, and the manager at his side was no surprise either. What stopped them cold was the third person in the room.
Taylor Swift was standing there.
Celebrities were Jimmy and Darren's daily bread. Two superstars of that size in the same small space, unannounced, was another thing entirely.
Darren went loud on instinct, rattling off to his chat at double speed, the cameraman scrambling to keep up. Jimmy took the calmer road, squaring himself up to introduce them properly.
"Lucas, who are they?" Taylor asked, not a flicker of recognition on her face. Then a second look. "Wait. They do look familiar..."
"They're celebrities in their own right, actually," Lucas said.
Jimmy dipped his head, a touch sheepish at being introduced that way. Darren, of course, wore it like a crown, grinning as he mouthed celebrities at his camera.
"Celebrities..." Taylor was visibly reaching, trying to place them. "Are you two big in another country, is that it? Sorry, it's lovely to meet you either way—"
"We're YouTubers, actually," Jimmy jumped in, gentle about it. "Internet celebrities—"
"Oh! That's why your faces looked familiar!" It clicked all at once, and a little color rose in her cheeks. "I'm so sorry if that came out wrong—"
"Not at all, not at all." Speed was beaming, thrilled down to his shoes. "Chat. CHAT. Are you seeing this right now? We're standing in front of Taylor Swift. Next to Lucas Knight. Somebody wake me up, this is a dream!"
Taylor laughed softly, warm but plainly lost as to who, or what, this "chat" he kept talking to actually was.
"And this," Lucas said, turning toward the older man as though the introduction had only just occurred to him, "is the president and CEO of Formula 1. Stefano Domenicali."
Taylor nodded and offered a graceful hello.
Jimmy and Darren, on the other hand, short-circuited on the spot.
"Wa— wait." Speed's voice cracked up an octave. "You're telling me this man's been the CEO of F1 this whole time?! Nah. NAH. I had no idea, bro!"
The room broke into laughter.
Jimmy just looked at the man and finally understood why the doors had opened so easily. They hadn't charmed their way up here. They'd been walking beside the CEO of Formula 1 the entire time.
"Ha. Pay me no mind." Stefano waved a hand, entirely at ease. "I'm only curious why you called these two up here, Lucas."
"You are, are you." Lucas's eyes moved to Jimmy. With a small nod excusing himself from the rest of the room, he drew the YouTuber a step aside and got into it.
That left Darren to split himself, wide-eyed, between the CEO of Formula 1 on one side and Taylor Swift on the other, while Lucas and Jimmy talked.
The pitch was simple enough. Lucas told him the door was open: a proper collaboration, and if Jimmy wanted it, a run in one of the F1 two-seaters for the channel. The one condition was small and easy to swallow. The lion's share of whatever the video pulled would go straight to the foundation.
"Figure it's about time I actually turned up in one of your videos," Lucas said, the corner of his mouth lifting. "I promised you this collab a while back and never made good on it." A pause. "Bit late, I know."
"I— no, I don't mind at all!" Jimmy said, nearly tripping over the words.
And he didn't. This was his entire game, the thing he'd built his name on, except now it came with Lucas Knight attached, and that made it worth far more than any single video's numbers ever could. A hit was a hit. A direct line to Lucas was something no amount of money could buy.
His talk with MrBeast wrapped, Lucas let his attention drift to the other one. Speed. The kid was a riot, and if nothing else, he'd keep the room from ever going quiet.
Right now he had Neil cornered, and from the look of it, Neil was enjoying him more than he'd expected to.
"So you're the one who manages Lucas?" Speed asked.
"That's me. And if you ever want managing yourself, I'm available." Neil's mouth curved.
Speed opened his mouth to fire back, then caught Lucas crossing over, finished with Jimmy.
"Yooo, Lucas, my guy! So good to finally meet you!" Darren swept him into a quick hug, barely pausing for breath. "So I heard this car you're driving is, like, actually hard to handle. Real talk, any chance I get a go in one?"
"Ha. A go in one?" Stefano cut in, brows lifting. "Young man, an F1 car is not something you simply try."
"Why not? I'll just send it." Darren said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
"Sure, sure." Stefano let it lie.
"You see this, chat?" Speed spun to his camera. "The CEO of F1 is looking down on us. Man doesn't believe."
Stefano only smiled. He was starting to get the shape of it: the constant narration, the "chat" the kid kept addressing like an invisible crowd at his shoulder.
Off to the side, Taylor watched the whole thing play out without a word. 'So these are the internet celebrities everyone talks about,' she thought, and couldn't quite land on how she felt about it.
---
Outside the tower, the work on the car was already in full swing. Engineers crawled over every inch of it, signing off on the thing piece by piece, and to put the final stamp on it they'd handed it to a name the crowd knew: Lewis Hamilton, out to shake it down himself.
For the fans in the stands it was a gift. The whole day belonged to Lucas, but getting to watch an actual champion put the car through its paces was a bonus nobody had promised them, and Lewis pulled a roar wherever he went.
Then, after a while, Lucas himself stepped out, and the noise doubled. What caught everyone off guard was the company he kept.
Flanking him were two of the internet's biggest names: MrBeast and Speed.
Up in their own spots, Logan Paul and JJ nearly did a double take.
"Hold on. What is that kid doing down there?" Logan stared, genuinely thrown. "I couldn't even get a meeting booked, and Speed's just... standing next to him? MrBeast I get. But that kid?"
JJ laughed. "Mate, I gave up trying to explain it ages ago. That boy stumbles into rooms with the biggest people alive and just chats to them like they're mates from down the road. Now he's gone and done it with Lucas."
He wasn't wrong. Back at the World Cup in 2022, Speed had bumped his way into one big name after another, treating every last one of them like an old neighbor.
Down in the pit lane, two of the two-seaters sat ready, engines already lit. Lucas got Jimmy strapped into the first with Lewis Hamilton up front, then climbed into the second himself, Darren dropping into the seat behind him. Cameras rolling in both. The signal fell, and the pair of cars tore off together.
"OH MY GOD. OH MY GOD—" Jimmy's voice tore away the instant Lewis launched, the world outside smearing into streaks of color.
In the other car, Speed didn't stand a chance of keeping it together.
"NAH. NAH NAH NAH, SLOW DOWN. SLOW DOWWWN. CHAT, I'M GONNA DIE, CHAT—AYO THIS IS NOT OKAY—" His words came apart into pure noise as the g-forces flattened him into the seat, half a scream, half a laugh, all of it live on stream.
They ran wheel to wheel the whole lap, Lucas and Lewis trading the lead, wringing every last reaction out of the two in the back.
One lap. That was all it took. By the time both cars rolled back in and the creators were pried loose, they were wrecked, legs loose under them, breath nowhere to be found, ears still ringing with the shriek of the engines.
"Wait, wait—you're telling me you're gonna go even FASTER than that?!" Speed rounded on Lucas, eyes huge. "Nah. Nah, that's crazy. You're not human."
"That was already so fast," Jimmy managed, hands still braced on his knees.
The crowd had watched the pair of them get folded into those cars and come out the far side barely able to stand, and it landed exactly the way you'd expect. People laughed, the F1 diehards loudest of all.
They'd badly underestimated just how much of a beast a real racing car could be.
Up in the grandstand, a cluster of older men sat shoulder to shoulder, watching and talking money.
"Lucas is up soon." One of them leaned back, arms folded over his belly. "I've got a grand on the Cruise Lap. Odds are only 1.25, so I'll barely clear anything if it lands. But it's the safe money."
"Safe money's boring." A man in his forties tugged his cap down over his eyes. "I've thrown ten thousand on Full Racing Pace for Question One. Four-forty on that."
"Ten grand?" another whistled low. "That's risky. Good odds, mind you."
"What about Question Two?" someone else put in. "Where'd you land?"
"Oh, baby. High risk, high reward." The man grinned wide. "Twenty thousand says he breaks three-thirty on the straight. Seventeen to one."
"You've lost your mind. Three-thirty-plus?" The first man barked a laugh. "He's an actor, not a grand prix winner. Nobody on earth pulls that their first proper time out."
This whole huddle of old men had, in effect, turned Lucas's run into their afternoon's gambling.
And they were far from the only ones. Around the world, countless others had money on the line for this exact thing. An event this loud was impossible to ignore, and where there was noise like that, someone would always find a way to turn a profit off it. That was part of why the run had swelled into such a spectacle at all: people could stake their savings on how well Lucas would drive.
The outfit behind the market was OddsMarket, an exchange that ran books on anything with a crowd around it, elections and all, and it hadn't hesitated to open one on the Lucas Knight run in Bahrain. It needed no blessing from Lucas or from F1 to do it.
On their site, front and center, sat the headline: "Lucas Knight — Global Ambassador: Bahrain Run."
Three questions hung beneath it.
Question 1 — Will he even try, or just cruise?
Are you betting he drives hard, or floats around waving?
Cruise lap — 1.25 (what most expect)
Full racing pace — 4.40
Question 2 — How fast does the car go on the straight?
Top speed. The single fastest number he hits.
Under 300 km/h — 1.30
Over 300 km/h — 3.60
330+ km/h — 17.0
Question 3 — How good is his lap time?
The whole lap, not just the straight. A quick lap means he took the corners too.
Within 5s of pole — 2.20
Within 2s — 15.0
Within 1s — 41.0
Simple enough to follow, and plenty of people felt the pull of those long-shot numbers. Most of them still put their money on the safe line. Lucas had looked good in an F1 car once, true, but he was no professional, and a showing like that wasn't easy to repeat. This car was a harder animal than the last one, besides.
None of it could be helped. Even if it sat badly with the people closest to him.
It sat especially badly with Jennifer, watching from home. She had Sera, Daciana, and Daria gathered around her, the staff filling out the rest of the room, all of them turned toward the big screen as the moment finally arrived.
"That's Daddy!" Sera pointed, bouncing on the spot.
"Oh? You see Daddy?" Jennifer smiled down at her. "He's handsome, isn't he?"
"Daddy handsome!" Sera nodded hard.
"Super handsome," Daciana added, flashing a charming little grin.
Daria just giggled at the pair of them.
For all the warmth in the room, Jennifer couldn't quite shake her irritation. Her friends had told her about the betting, and something in her curdled at the thought of strangers wagering on whether her husband would shine or crash. Worse were the odds themselves, stacked as though nobody out there believed he could pull it off.
'Just wait and see what my Lucas does out there,' she thought, her eyes hardening with quiet certainty. She believed in him, however dangerous this was.
...
"You ready?" Stefano clapped a hand on Lucas's shoulder.
"Yeah." Lucas was already suited, helmet tucked under his arm. "Feeling better than the last time, even."
"Good." Stefano gave a short nod.
Lewis leaned in close, his voice dropping. "Hands loose out there. Don't fight the car; breathe through the corners and let it come to you. Trust the front end and it'll do the rest."
Lucas nodded once, then folded himself down into the cockpit. One camera sat trained on his visor to catch every flicker of reaction, another rode the bodywork to sell the raw speed of the thing, and MrBeast's crew had their own lenses running alongside for the video.
Down the gantry, the five red lights lit one by one, held for a breath, then went dark all at once.
Lucas launched hard.
The commentary box came alive on the instant. "He hasn't held back for a second! Lucas is on it straight away, driving like he means every inch of it! The only question now is whether he can hang on to it!"
Up in the stands, the reactions ran the full spread. The car moved with a smoothness nobody had braced for, and as it reached the straight, Lucas simply fed it everything he had. The needle tore past 208 miles an hour, north of 335 on the board.
"He is over three hundred and thirty kilometers an hour on the straight! Unbelievable! From an actor, of all people!"
The whole grandstand pulled in one breath at once. At home, across a million screens, people leaned in with their hearts climbing.
And already, scattered through the crowd, the groaning had begun.
"You're joking. I put five grand on under three hundred. Five thousand dollars, gone."
"There goes the rent."
"He's an actor. How is he doing any of this?"
But the man in the cap was up on his feet, both fists overhead. "THREE-THIRTY! Twenty thousand at seventeen to one! Do the math, boys, I just cleared three hundred grand!"
It was already a hell of a thing to watch. What came next left it in the shade.
Because the straight was the easy part. Point the car, bury the throttle, hold your nerve; anyone with enough of it could chase a big number down a straight line.
The corners were where the truth lived. Braking at the last possible meter, turning in on pure faith, finding the apex and getting back on the power before the car had even settled.
That was the line between a fast passenger and an actual driver, and it was exactly where every last person had expected Lucas to come undone.
He didn't. He threw the car into the corner complex and came out the far side clean, no lift, no correction, carrying so much speed that his lap flashed up within two seconds of pole.
The commentary box came apart at the seams.
"That is NOT possible! He's carrying pro-level pace through the CORNERS, not the straight, the corners! Do you understand what that means?! An actor, two seconds off a pole time set by the fastest men on the planet!"
Two rows down, a man shot to his feet, ten thousand on the within-two-seconds line suddenly looking golden. "TEN GRAND! I had ten grand on two seconds! LET'S GO!"
One seat over, an old man had both hands buried in his hair. He'd laid thirty thousand dollars on the safe line, a lap somewhere inside five seconds of pole, the kind of modest bet you weren't supposed to be able to lose. And he was losing it, because Lucas had blown clean past that whole band and made his caution worthless. "This isn't real. He didn't drive anything like this the last time!"
Trackside, Lewis Hamilton stared, eyes stretched wide. "This... is this even real?"
Stefano stood frozen at his shoulder. "Holy..."
Because yes, Lucas had touched two hundred miles an hour in that earlier car; but that had been a straight, and only a straight. He had never once linked corners together like this, never carried a full lap to within a breath of a professional's.
Nobody in that place could make it add up. It ran clean past anything they'd let themselves imagine.
Even the drivers watching were caught. Max narrowed his eyes at the feed. "That's actually Lucas in there?"
Then Lucas went around again, and somehow found more.
The same violence down the straight, but now he went after the corners like a man who'd driven them a thousand times. Later on the brakes. Tighter to the apex. Back on the power a fraction earlier every exit, the car right on the edge of letting go and never quite doing it. The lap crossed the line inside one second of pole.
One second. Off the best in the world. From a man who, not long ago, had never raced a thing in his life.
That was the number that broke the grandstand open. The two-second man's arms sank as his golden bet got leapfrogged in a single lap, and beside him someone else was coming apart with joy; he'd thrown four thousand at the within-one-second line, forty-one to one, the bet nobody in their right mind touched. "FORTY-ONE TO ONE! That's a hundred and sixty thousand dollars! Somebody pinch me!"
Neil didn't say anything at first. He'd told Lucas, in plain words, to keep something in reserve, to put his own neck ahead of the show. Lucas had gone flat to the floor and ignored every syllable of it.
He should have been furious. Mostly he just couldn't drag his eyes off the timing screen.
"...This idiot," Neil muttered, and there was no bite left in it. He'd spent his whole career standing next to the best people in the business, and he knew the real thing when it was right in front of him. He'd just never once thought he'd be looking at it here, in a car, coming from Lucas.
"...Could he actually do this for real?" he murmured, eyes stuck on the timing screen. "Go pro in this sport?"