The late afternoon sun painted the Yas Marina Circuit in amber and shadow, a golden hour that made for stunning television but was hell for tire management. The pit wall reeked of hot rubber and spent fuel, the air dense with the faint tang of ozone from overworked electronics. Engines screamed down the main straight, a rolling thunder broken only by bursts of radio chatter and the staccato hiss of air guns from the neighboring garages. James Hartley stood on the pit wall, headset pressed against his ear, watching three screens at once: the live timing tower, the tire degradation curves, and the TV feed showing his driver carving through Turn 9.
Connor Walsh. Twenty-two years old. Fast, fearless, and running out of time to prove he deserved an F1 seat.
Currently P2. Eight laps to go. And the championship hung by a thread.
James's eyes flicked to the championship standings. Connor was eight points behind Marcus DaSilva, the Brazilian golden boy who'd already signed his F1 contract for 2026. DaSilva was running P4, his Campos Racing entry visibly struggling on worn Pirellis, the rear tires marbled with shredded rubber. Smoke wisped from his wheels every time he hit the brakes.
The mathematics were brutally simple: if Connor finished P2 and DaSilva stayed P4 or lower, Connor would win the championship by six points. One position. That's all they needed to hold.
"Rears are going off, James." Connor's voice came through the radio, clipped and professional, but the tension was unmistakable. "I'm getting wheelspin out of every corner."
James studied telemetry. Rear tire temperatures: 112°C and climbing. Optimal: 95–105°C. The tires were spent. But the gap to P3 was only 2.8 seconds; a pit stop now would be suicide. They'd drop to P7 and fight through traffic with only seven laps left.
His mind ran the scenarios, the same calculations he'd been doing for thirty-four years.
Scenario A: Pit now. New mediums. 18-second stop to rejoin P7. Must pass three cars in seven laps on a notorious processional track.
Scenario B: Stay out. Manage tire temperatures. Nurse the car home. The gap to P3 was growing—now 3.2 seconds, and DaSilva was fading. Hold station.
The math wasn't even close.
But James had lived long enough in motorsport to know that mathematics and reality were different things. He'd seen races decided by safety cars, by mechanical failures, by moments of brilliance or madness. Twenty laps on tires designed for fifteen was a gamble. And yet, as he watched the sector times flash green, he felt that familiar twist in his chest—the one that whispered maybe.
Maybe one more stop would secure it. Maybe DaSilva would pit. Maybe, this was the time to risk it.
His thumb hovered over the pit-to-car button, pulse hammering in his temples. The headset pressed too tight against his skull. He could almost hear the call forming in his throat—"Box this lap."
He stared at the data feed, at the line that showed rear temps spiking, at the delta ticking down. For one second, the weight of thirty-four years pressed down like the desert heat.
Then he let his hand drop.
No. He knew this story. He'd lived it too many times. At Larrousse in '93, they pitted Erik Comas from P3 at Donington with twelve laps to go, chasing glory. He rejoined P8 and finished P9. James could still see the chief engineer's face afterward—older, emptier. Never give up the position, the man had told him. Never trust the comeback.
James had learned that lesson. Learned it through decades of experience in the paddock nobody remembered—the guy who made the safe call, the reliable call, the call that kept teams solvent and careers intact. He wasn't brilliant or bold, but he was still here. Still surviving.
He pressed the button. James didn't hesitate. "Connor, stay out," he ordered, voice steady. "Manage the rears. Lift and coast into the corners, carry momentum out. We're bringing this home."
Three seconds of dead air. He pictured Connor sweat-soaked, arms aching from fighting the steering, eyes locked on DaSilva's car ahead.
"You sure?" Connor's voice was tight. "I'm really sliding here."
"I'm sure. P2 wins us the championship. Just hold the station."
"…Copy."
James exhaled slowly. Beside him, Marcus Kane, the twenty-eight-year-old race engineer, glanced over, eyebrows raised. Marcus hadn't watched enough strategies fall apart to understand the value of certainty over potential.
Lap 38/42
The gap to P3 stabilized at 3.4 seconds. Connor was managing it. DaSilva remained P4, the Campos car twitching badly under braking.
James allowed himself a breath. Four laps. Just four more laps.
Then Connor's sector time went purple.
James blinked. "What the—" Marcus leaned forward. Connor must be burning his energy deployment—gambling all his stored electric power on one sector.
The TV feed sliced to Turn 11. Connor's car appeared on screen, plunging impossibly late to the inside, threading between the P1 car, Ricardo Valesquez, and the apex curbing. Two wheels on the paint, rear tires howling, yet the car somehow held.
Connor rocketed out of Turn 11 in P1.
"Connor!" James's voice cracked with urgency. "What are you doing?! Hold position!"
"I can win this!" Connor's voice was electric, breathless. "I can see the gap, I can—"
Then physics reasserted itself.
Turn 14. The long right-hander before the penultimate straight. Connor turned in too hard, asking too much from tires that had nothing left. The rear snapped—sudden, violent, final. The car spun backward into the gravel, stones hammering the carbon fiber. For one frozen moment, the pit wall went silent.
Then Connor's radio crackled: 'No. No! No, no, no—'
The timing screen went yellow. Virtual Safety Car deployed.
Connor's radio came alive, raw and laced with profanity: "No. No! No, no, no—damn it!"
James stood frozen, staring at the screen that now read:
LAP 38 - WALSH #12 - RETIRED.
Behind him, the chief mechanic, perhaps, cursed viciously. Marcus gripped the edge of the desk, knuckles white. The team owner's voice shattered through the command channel: "Hartley! What the hell just happened?!"
James didn't answer. He watched the screen: marshals ran to Connor's car, the Virtual Safety Car slowed the leader, Ricardo Valesquez, who'd inherited the win, and Marcus DaSilva cruised past the beached car in P4, securing enough points to clinch the championship.
The mathematics had changed. Permanently.
Connor Walsh: 0 points. Championship position: 3rd.
Marcus DaSilva: 2025 FIA Formula 2 Champion.
James pulled off his headset. His hands were shaking.
Two Hours Later
The garage had emptied. Mechanics packed equipment into flight cases with mechanical efficiency, avoiding eye contact. Connor had vanished.
James sat on a stack of Pirelli tire blankets, still wearing his damp team shirt.
James glanced down at his callused hands. Fifty-eight years of this: seeing other men's dreams fulfilled.
"Hartley."
Martin Cross stood in the garage entrance, tailored suit and granite face silhouetted against the twilight.
"My office," Cross said. "Now."
Cross's hospitality suite overlooked the harbor. James sat in a leather chair, watching Cross pour two fingers of whisky into crystal tumblers.
"You want one?" Cross offered.
"No. Thank you."
Cross shrugged, then knocked back one glass himself, and sat across from James with the other.
"You're done."
"Connor disobeyed the strategy—" James protested.
"Connor's twenty-two and desperate for an F1 seat," Cross cut in. "You're fifty-eight and supposedly the adult in the room." He leaned forward.
"You had the championship, James. You had it. Pit him on lap 36, put him on fresh mediums, and he finishes P2 comfortably. Instead, you gambled on dead rubber and gave him just enough hope to do something stupid."
"I made the call I thought—"
"You made the wrong call."
Cross slid a manila folder across the coffee table. His hand trembled, a small, involuntary tremor. He masked it instantly behind protocol and steel.
"Severance package. Three months' salary. You're out, effective immediately."
James stared at the folder. He didn't reach for it.
"You're a good man, James," Cross said, and for a moment his voice softened. "Genuinely. You work hard, you care about the team, you know the sport inside and out. But this business doesn't reward good men. It rewards winners."
"You're a survivor, James. Always have been. But this business doesn't need survivors—it needs killers. And you've never had that in you."
The words should've hurt. Instead, James just felt tired.
"Clear your things out tonight," Cross continued. "I don't want you at the factory when the team gets back to the UK. Clean break. Better for everyone."
James stood, picked up the folder, and walked to the door.
"For what it's worth," Cross called after him, "you should've gotten your shot fifteen years ago. Maybe things would've been different."
Maybe, James thought. But probably not.
As James walked down the corridor, reality settled in: a crushing weight on his chest. Thirty-four years vanished. A lifetime in motorsport yielded nothing but grey hair, the thin severance folder, and the echo of engines that weren't his anymore.
He'd started brilliantly at twenty-four, fresh out of university, with the arrogance of youth and the conviction he'd be the next Newey or Brawn.
Back then, he thought genius was just a matter of effort. He could still see the Lola LC91 chassis, the geometry he'd designed for Gachot and Bernard, the thrill of watching numbers on a page become carbon and steel screaming into the straight.
For a moment, he'd been untouchable.
Then Larrousse folded in '94: bankrupt, broken, forgotten. He remembered walking out of the factory with a cardboard box, thinking it was a temporary setback. It wasn't. Benetton came next. He stood ten meters from Schumacher and witnessed true brilliance. The precision, the instinct, the way genius seemed effortless.
That's when he knew. He wasn't like that.
Still, he'd been good. Not brilliant, but fiercely solid. Then success, or what passed for it, started to dull him. Complacency, he admitted now. His ambition turned inward, chasing everything instead of mastering one thing. Strategy, team management, engineering oversight—he'd tried to be the complete package.
But F1 didn't reward dabblers; it rewarded specialists. And by his thirties, the sport had moved on without him.
The next three decades were survival, not progress. Journeyman. That was the word for it. Fabricator at Minardi: honing precision on a shoestring. Strategist at Super Aguri: internalizing tire degradation in the real world. Engineering coordinator at Manor: deciphering how suspension flex translated into driver feedback.
Then the management roles. Holding broken teams together with spreadsheets and stubbornness. He wasn't brilliant at any of it. But he learned.
He'd learned everything that mattered. How chassis flex killed tires. How driver preference shaped setup. How to wring performance from failure, to make something functional when everyone else was out of ideas. That was his real gift: not genius, but relentless persistence.
The junior formulas had finally given him a second life. Eight years rebuilding from the bottom—F4, F3—teaching, developing, creating cars that consistently punched above their weight. That's where he started to matter again.
His multidisciplinary mind, the one F1 never valued, suddenly worked. He could connect everything: design, strategy, driver development. It made sense now.
The F2 championship in 2025 was supposed to be his vindication. One championship. Then he could walk away knowing he'd built something that lasted.
But now? The walls of the corridor seemed to close in, cold and sterile under the fluorescents. All that knowledge, all those years—and he still lost it all in one afternoon.
No. James closed his eyes. Connor lost it. Connor ignored the tire deg, went for glory, and binned the car.
But the voice in his head—the one that sounded like every team principal who'd ever let him go—whispered back: You put him in that position. You left him on dead tires. You gambled and lost.
James drove his rental Toyota through empty Abu Dhabi streets. His phone sat dead in the cupholder. There was a text from Sarah, his ex-wife: Emily is pregnant. She wanted to tell you herself, but... Maybe you should call her?
Emily. Their daughter. Twenty-six now, married last year to a dentist from Surrey. James had missed the wedding—he'd been at a F2 round at Spa that weekend, unable to get away. Sarah had sent photos. Emily looked beautiful. Happy.
He typed: I will. I promise.
Then deleted it.
The rain started to fall, unusual for Abu Dhabi in November, fat drops smacking the windshield like sharp accusations. The GPS directed him toward the E11 highway, back to his hotel near the airport. James barely registered the turns.
Fifty-eight years old. No job. No family. A life defined by almosts and not-quites—his legacy written in second places and near misses.
You should've been better, he thought. Smarter. Braver. More.
James barely registered the turns. Then the truck ran the red, horn blaring, 100 kph of pure inevitability.
James saw it for half a second—a massive grille, a blaring horn—then IMPACT. Metal shrieked. Glass exploded into diamonds. The world became a violent, flipping strobe, ending in a crushing, total darkness.
In that final fraction, images flooded his mind: Emily's wedding photo on the mantel, her smile so much like her mother's; Sarah laughing on the pit wall at Monaco in '98, headset too big for her; the one race he had won: Spa, years ago, rain pouring, a perfect call.
His last coherent thought wasn't about the crash, or the team, or the sport. It was a single, powerful regret: He had wasted everything.
The darkness lasted forever. Then: fluorescent light. Buzzing. Harsh.
Not the hospital. Somewhere else.
Wet tile chilled his cheek.
James gasped, lungs burning, and lurched upright. His vision swam. He was on a bathroom floor ,cracked tile, urinal stalls along one wall.
What—where—
He scrambled to his feet, head spinning, and immediately stumbled. His body felt wrong. Too light. Too limber. He looked down.
Young hands. Smooth skin, no liver spots. The narrow wrists of a twenty-two-year-old, clad in unfamiliar denim.
No. This isn't ,this can't be—
Panic clawed up his throat. He staggered to the sink, gripped the chipped porcelain edge, and looked up.
The mirror showed a stranger: twenty-two years old.
Shaggy brown hair, still damp with rain. Sharp jawline, no trace of the jowls James had developed in his forties. Blue eyes, wide with shock.
Not his face.
Except—
Jack Hartley. The name slammed into him, a new memory-set violently merging with the old: Growing up in Beeston. Cambridge University, engineering degree. Graduation three days ago. The party at The Eagle pub tonight.
And underneath it all: fifty-eight years of failure. Of Abu Dhabi. Of Martin Cross's words: You're not a winner.
James—Jack—gripped the sink harder, staring at his reflection.
"This isn't real," he whispered, his young voice unfamiliar. "I'm dying. This is dying, this is all a hallucination."
Outside, someone pounded on the door. "Oi! Hartley! You alright in there, mate?"
Jack's mouth moved automatically: "Yeah. Fine. Just—give me a minute."
Footsteps retreated. Laughter echoed from the pub beyond.
Jack reached into his jacket pocket. His fingers found a wallet; worn leather, initials D.H. embossed on the corner. He pulled it out, opened it.
A student ID: Jack Hartley, Churchill College, Engineering Sciences.
Twenty pounds in notes.
And buried in the billfold, an envelope. Inside: five hundred pounds in crisp cash, the Queen's face staring up at him.
A card tucked in with the money, handwritten: Graduation present. Make us proud Jackie. Love, Mum & Dad.
Jack stared at the cash.
At the face in the mirror.
At the impossible, undeniable reality.
It was 1975.
Jack raised a trembling hand to his face, fingertips tracing the smooth skin, the sharp jaw, the unfamiliar contours that weren't his.
And he remembered everything.