Universal Pictures had come in generous, even by Lucas' standards. Seventy-five million dollars, paid flat; no points on the back end, just the number.
The studio wanted onto what the trades called the Lucas bandwagon, the money machine Warner and Disney had already run and cashed. Nobody argued it anymore. Put Lucas Knight on a poster and the audience showed up, every market, every language.
After Bahrain the number under his name only climbed. He'd stopped being measured against the current crop and started getting measured against legends. The Golden Boy title the country had pinned on him years ago didn't read as flattery now; it read as fact.
"So what's the verdict?" Neil kept his arms crossed, reading Lucas instead of the contract. "We taking it?"
Lucas turned the last page and slid the stack onto the table. "Money's clean. No backend games. But there's a clause tying me to the next F&F sequel too. They've penciled me into the whole franchise before I've even signed the first one."
"Because they have." Neil huffed a laugh. "They want their next Vin Diesel. Same face, same seat, ten years running. Take it and you never work a hard day again. Cars, the family, checks that land whether you get out of bed or not."
He didn't wait for a response. "That's a dream offer for a normal actor. You're not a normal actor. Any other guy would bite my hand off. You're going to pass. I already know you're going to pass."
"You already know." Lucas' mouth tugged. "I'm not trying to sound arrogant. But I can't chain myself to one franchise until I'm old and gray, playing the same guy in my sixties. At some point I retire, and I actually want to enjoy it. With my family, not on a call sheet."
Neil pressed a hand to his chest and let his face crumple. "Don't. Don't put that in my head. You, retired. Me, sitting here with no client to milk—" He caught himself, wounded. "To nurture. Develop. The horror. I'll be a broken man."
"Save it." Lucas smiled at him. "You're already a multi-millionaire. Off me."
"Yeah, yeah. Off you." The grief evaporated. "I've got houses now. I can buy my girlfriend stuff with more than two zeros on it. Doesn't mean I want the gravy train parked." He was already reaching for his phone. "So we're killing Universal. On it."
He got someone on the line and turned the studio down on Lucas' behalf without a flicker of ceremony, the way he did everything.
---
The next stretch of days ran on Ambassador duties. Wherever Lucas showed up for Formula One, the numbers followed; ratings and stream counts kept snapping records that had stood for years. Bahrain had done what the sport's marketers had chased for a decade; people who'd never watched a lap in their lives were suddenly arguing tire strategy.
The press had a name for him now: Mr. Extraordinary. His stock had never sat higher, and none of the offers flooding in were F1 teams. TAG Heuer wanted him fronting a racing line; Rolex circled the same idea from the paddock. Louis Vuitton and Dior both pitched campaigns, and word was Armani had reached out himself. Nike floated a signature line, Apple wanted him in a product film, and Pepsi came knocking with a Super Bowl-scale number. Everyone wanted a piece of the man the country had decided to be proud of.
The offers came in a flood, every one of them wanting to rent Lucas's name and face for a while.
The most interesting didn't have the deepest pockets. A sports-drink startup, the one KSI and Logan Paul had built into an overnight sensation, came asking Lucas to put himself behind the product. They couldn't touch the numbers the giants were throwing around, and they knew it; so instead of cash they offered equity, a real slice of the company, betting a stake would catch his eye where a check wouldn't.
Then there was MrBeast. The snack brand he'd spun up off his own name came with a different pitch. Shares in the company, and something built alongside it: a foundation the two of them would run together, aimed at people who needed the help and at the planet itself, the kind of effort that put millions of trees in the ground. Money and meaning in the same envelope.
The internet had already caught the scent of that one. Rumors were running that Lucas might turn up in another MrBeast video, and millions were losing their minds over the maybe of it.
Neil had fielded every piece of it: the offers, the calls, the founders who thought a big enough pitch might land them a meeting. He kept it all off Lucas's plate, and for good reason. There was something bigger on the table this week, and it wasn't any of them.
It arrived while Lucas was still in Saudi, walking straight through his hotel door.
Zak Brown, McLaren's CEO, had flown in to see him at the hotel. Nothing accidental about it on either side; Lucas wanted to hear what McLaren had brought, and Zak had crossed a continent to say it in person.
He lit up the moment he saw him, hand already out. "I finally get to shake the hand of the legend himself."
"I'm far from a legend, sir." Lucas took it, easy.
"Don't be modest." Zak laughed, grip tightening. "Who's challenging you on a track right now? Not one other actor alive, I'll tell you that."
From the side, Neil kept it dry. "Even Tom Cruise couldn't have pulled off that stunt."
"Agreed."
The pleasantries ran their short course, and then Zak got to it.
"So let me lay it out." He settled in. "You come on as McLaren's ambassador, and here's what that looks like for you. A W1, secured, in your name. Two years, fifteen million a year." He let it breathe, then leaned in. "And that's not even the part I'm most pleased to be offering."
"No?" Lucas said.
"No." His grin came slow. "McLaren is prepared to float a signature series. A Knight Edition."
Lucas caught the weight of it at once, and it had nothing to do with the W15 Knight.
That car had only ever been his name printed onto a Mercedes works build for the Bahrain run, a one-off with KNIGHT down the side. Everyone understood it as exactly that; a badge for a stunt, not a machine that was his in any real sense.
This was another thing entirely. McLaren putting the Knight name on a road car of its own, a limited line carried and sold as its own model. Not a courtesy for the cameras. A place in the marque's history.
"So?" Zak spread his hands, plainly enjoying his own generosity. "What do you think?"
Even Lucas hadn't expected a brand like McLaren to hand him that kind of prestige.
Beside him, Neil's eyes had already gone bright, a Knight Edition parked somewhere in his own garage in his head.
"And don't get hung up on the two years." Zak waved a hand. "It's not a job, alright? I'm not going to have you flying out every other week, running yourself ragged for us. You put your name to it, you show up for the big stuff, and the rest of the time you don't hear from me. That's the whole thing." He tapped the table. "And the Knight Edition, I want to be clear about this, that's got nothing to do with the money side. It's its own thing. Separate contract, separate everything. I'm not slipping it in to make the fifteen look nicer than it is."
Lucas looked at him a beat longer than before. "Am I really worth all that to a car company?"
"Are you kidding?" Zak laughed. "You're about the most wanted man on the planet right now, and your guy here knows it better than anybody. What you did in Bahrain, honestly, I don't think you've fully worked out how big that was."
"See, this is him every time." Neil shook his head, half a smile on it. "Never thinks he's worth what he's worth."
"Alright, alright." Lucas huffed a laugh. "It's a good offer, I'll give you that. Neil handles the paperwork, that's his job, not mine. If the clauses check out, we're good."
"You won't regret it, Mr. Knight. I mean that."
"Thank you." Lucas offered his hand. Zak took it, then thought better of it and pulled him into a hug, a solid clap on the back.
"Do me a favor, let's grab a photo." He had his phone out already, a little sheepish about it. "My family are massive fans of yours. They'll never believe I met you otherwise."
Lucas laughed and told him sure. They stood in for the shot, Zak grinning like he'd forgotten he was the one who ran a Formula 1 team.
Then he was gone, still buzzing on his way out.
Neil waited about half a second after the door shut.
"So." He turned the second the door clicked shut. "That Knight Edition. They're making more than one, right? Asking for a friend. The friend is me."
"Handle the clauses first."
"That's a yes. I'm hearing a yes."
---
The days ran together, race bleeding into race, and Lucas settled into the ambassador's rhythm without quite meaning to. He learned more than he let on.
The ceremonial part came first. When the racing finished he was the one F1 kept sending up to the podium to hand the top three their trophies, close enough to the spray to come away smelling of champagne, and the drivers had thawed toward him enough to give him a hard time about it.
At one of them Max collected his trophy out of Lucas's hands and gave him a flat, sideways look on the way past. "You should be taking one of these. Not handing them out."
It was dry as everything Max said, and the handful of people near enough caught it and laughed, but nobody mistook it for a throwaway either. Max didn't do compliments. That was about as close as the man ever came to one.
The commentary booth was where he surprised people. Broadcasters had clocked what he did to the ratings; word that Lucas was sitting in sent the numbers up, and Sky wanted him on air whenever he'd say yes. F1 kept sending him during sessions, half for that and half, Lucas suspected, because a good part of the paddock still wasn't sure whether Bahrain had been the real thing or a very expensive accident.
He sat in for the back half of a qualifying hour beside Crofty and Brundle, headset on, happy to listen while the two of them worked.
It was Brundle who tested him, the way an old driver will.
"You've actually driven one of these now." He half-turned in his seat. "So tell me something I can't see from up here. What's this lap missing?"
Lucas watched the onboard climb toward the first corner before he answered.
"He's going to lose it on entry. Watch his hands." He nodded at the monitor. "Too much speed going in, he'll have to scrub it off mid-corner. Gains nothing on paper and gives the exit away, because the rears are already gone. His last lap was the quicker one. He just doesn't know it yet."
Brundle's brows went up. Crofty hunched over his own screen. A breath later the car ran wide at the exit, the driver caught it, and the sector flashed on the wall two-tenths down on the man's own earlier time.
Neither commentator said anything for a second.
"...He's right." Crofty half-laughed toward the camera. "Called that corner by corner, before the man had even turned in."
"That's someone reading it from in the cockpit, not up here." Brundle was studying him now, openly. "Where did you learn to see a lap like that?"
"Beginner's luck." Lucas said it dead flat, then let it sit just long enough before the booth could turn solemn on him. "Don't put me on a pit wall, though. I'd have all twenty in the barriers by lap three and blame the tyres."
Crofty went, and even Brundle broke with him, and whatever weight had been gathering lifted clean out of the room. Which was the point.
What had quietly become the real draw for him, though, was the garages. F1 gave him the run of them, and while everyone assumed he was there to admire the cars, he was really watching how a team ran from the inside; the people, the calls they made, the money moving under all of it.
At McLaren, Andrea Stella met him at the door with his hand already out. "Lucas. Good to have you with us." The careful formality Andrea wore was warmed the whole way through, and no wonder; he already knew about the deal taking shape on the road-car side, and made no secret of how glad he was to have the man attached to it.
Lucas had barely finished at the McLaren box when Toto found him.
The Mercedes principal came in easy, an arm going round his shoulder, walking him a few steps clear of the nearest ears before he spoke, voice low.
"I keep hearing a thing." The smile was easy; the eyes were not. "That you've gone and made yourself some quiet little arrangement with McLaren. So tell me, friend to friend, what is it? Give me the number and let me spoil their week with a better one."
He put it as a joke. He was at least half serious. The two of them had grown close over these weeks, and being on the outside of something plainly needled him.
Lucas gave him a warm nothing. "Toto, if I had a secret deal, you'd be the last man alive I'd tell. You'd have it outbid before I finished the sentence."
"So there is a deal." Toto pointed at him, caught between delight and being caught out.
"I didn't say that."
Toto laughed and let go of it, though the look he left behind said the subject was only resting.
And it wasn't only to Toto that Lucas let a little slip. Across more than one garage that week he pushed a thought further than an ambassador's small talk usually went. Not a sponsorship. A stake. A piece of a real team. None of them turned him away; a name like his, with the money behind it, would be welcome on any cap table in the pit lane. But welcome and simple were different things.
Ownership here sat tangled in shareholders and holding companies and prices that started north of a billion, and nobody was carving off a slice because they liked his driving. It would take time, and a fight. He was fine with both.
The weeks rolled on the way they do, and almost before anyone had ticked them off, the paddock was in Australia.
Lucas walked the grid in Melbourne, part of the ambassador routine by now. It was a world away from the run in Bahrain, the near-full-power lap that had put him inside a second of pole and knocked the whole sport sideways; nothing was ever going to touch that.
But the grid walk still landed in its own right, and Albert Park was the stage for it, one of the biggest crowds on the calendar, the grandstands full to the top rail and the lake shining out past them.
Which made it the right place to stop keeping the secret. A few weeks on from that hotel room in Jeddah, the lawyers had finished their part and the ink was dry. So after the grid walk, McLaren told the world.
[Sky Sports F1 — Knight joins McLaren: Bahrain sensation named brand ambassador in shock deal.]
Down the pit lane the reaction split in two: the teams that had been circling him, and the one that had actually landed him.
Toto took it hardest, though not with surprise. He'd suspected as much from the moment Lucas dodged his question in the garage, and seeing it confirmed still stung, mostly because he'd stood there offering to outbid a deal already signed and let himself be played to his face. What annoyed him was that he admired the move; he'd have done the same.
Ferrari's Vasseur wore it lightly. He'd made his approach and been turned down like everyone else, and he wasn't one to mourn a race he was never leading. McLaren could enjoy the win; he had a car to sort.
Lawrence Stroll took it worst and said the least. He was used to outbidding people for what he wanted, and losing the biggest name in the paddock to McLaren wasn't the kind of defeat his money usually allowed.
None of it changed the result. McLaren had moved first, and made sure the world heard about it at the one race where the world was already watching.
And yet, for all the noise it made, the announcement still wasn't the thing about Lucas the internet was actually counting down to.
Because while the season rolled on as normal, Lucas had already had a quiet word with F1: come April, their Global Ambassador would be missing from the grid. Nobody argued, because there wasn't a promoter alive who'd fight him on where he was going instead.
Coachella.
It was closing in fast, and the lineup read like a decade of the charts folded into one desert weekend. Taylor Swift. Justin Bieber. Eminem. A card deep enough to headline three festivals, and somehow it was still Lucas's name in the middle of it that nobody could stop talking about.
Online, the countdown had already started.
"Lucas Knight AND Eminem at the same coachella. I will simply not be surviving that weekend"
"Taylor, Bieber, Eminem, Lucas. What do you MEAN this is one lineup"
"Man drives an f1 car in march and headlines Coachella in April. Is there anything left he's NOT doing this year"
The festival was still weeks out, and the internet was already carrying on like the gates opened tomorrow.