Cambridge, Late November 1975. 2:30 AM.
Jack stumbled out of The Eagle's bathroom. The pub noise hit him like a wall: laughter, Queen blaring from the jukebox, the clink of glasses. His friends were still at their table; Tommy was mid-sentence about something, and another friend was laughing.
They looked so young.
His legs moved automatically toward the table. Tommy glanced up.
"There he is! Oi, Hartley, you alright? It looked like you were about to chuck everywhere."
Jack's mouth opened. What came out was: "Yeah. Just... need some air."
"Lightweight!" someone shouted.
Laughter washed over him as they turned back to their conversation.
He stood there, frozen. These weren't his friends. He didn't know these people. Jack Hartley knew them. The memories were there, ghostly and accessible, but they felt like someone else's photographs.
Tommy Wickham. Roommate at Churchill College. They'd known each other for three years, shared a flat, gotten drunk together after exams. Jack could remember all of it, but the memories had no emotional weight, like reading someone's diary.
"Hartley?" Tommy was looking at him again, concerned now. "You sure you're alright, mate?"
Say something. Act normal.
"I'm fine," Jack managed. "Just gonna walk it off. See you tomorrow?"
"Course. Get some rest, yeah?"
Nodding, he headed for the door. Behind him, Tommy muttered something to the others—probably "Had too much, didn't he?"—and the conversation moved on.
The cold November air outside was a mercy. Walking without direction, hands shoved in his jacket pockets, his mind was screaming.
This is actually happening. I died. And now I'm... what? Possessing someone? Stealing their life?
Stopping under a streetlight, he pulled out the wallet again. Jack Hartley's student ID stared back at him. The face in the photo matched the face he'd seen in the mirror. Twenty-two years old. Cambridge Engineering Sciences degree. Graduation three days ago.
He started walking again, faster now. His breath misted in the cold air. The Cambridge streets were mostly empty; students were either at pubs or sleeping off hangovers. Old stone buildings loomed in the darkness, centuries of history pressing down.
He needed to test this. Prove it was real.
The next street over had a newsstand, closed but with tomorrow's papers visible behind the glass. Pressing his face close, he read the date in The Guardian: Saturday, 29 November 1975.
This is real. This is actually real.
He'd died. He was certain of that. The impact, the darkness, the sense of ending—that had been death. And now he was here, fifty years in the past, wearing another man's skin.
Another man.
He stopped walking. His chest tightened.
Not another man. Me. I'm Jack Hartley. I have his memories. His childhood. His parents.
But underneath Jack Hartley's memories, like a photograph double-exposed, existed the fifty-eight years he had just lived.
Sarah.
The name brought a wave of emotion so intense he had to lean against a brick wall. Sarah Brennan, who he'd met at Benetton in 1997, was a sharp-minded marketing executive with a laugh that could fill a room. They'd married in 1999, divorcing in 2014 after he had missed too many anniversaries, school plays, and moments that couldn't be rescheduled around race calendars.
And Emily.
God, Emily.
Born in 2000. Dark hair like her mother's, a stubborn streak like her father's. She'd wanted to be a veterinarian at age seven, then an astronaut at ten, then finally settled on architecture at sixteen. He'd missed her Manchester graduation for preseason testing in Bahrain. Missed her wedding last year because of Spa.
She'd stopped calling six months ago.
And now she doesn't exist.
Wouldn't exist for another twenty-five years. Might never exist, because Jack Hartley of Cambridge wasn't going to meet Sarah Brennan at Benetton, wasn't going to marry her, wasn't going to father the daughter whose absence now carved a hole in his chest.
Jack slid down the wall until he was sitting on damp pavement, arms wrapped around his knees.
I lost everything. The accident took everything.
The rain started again. Fat drops landed on his hair, his face, mixing with tears he couldn't stop.
He didn't know how long he sat there. Long enough that his legs went numb. Long enough that the crying exhausted itself into gasping breaths and empty, chest-heaving silence.
His hands shook. For several minutes, he couldn't think past the sheer weight of it: the finality, the waste, the life he'd never get back.
Then something shifted. Not a thought exactly. More like a feeling rising from somewhere deeper than consciousness.
It wasn't that the grief disappeared. It was still there, real and crushing. But underneath it, like a shark rising from deep water, something else was waking up.
Now you have everything.
The thought came unbidden, cold and calculating. It was the pragmatist in him, the part that had survived thirty-four years in motorsport by seeing opportunities in disasters.
He pulled out the appointment letter from his jacket:
BRABHAM RACING ORGANISATION Chessington, Surrey
Dear Mr. Hartley,
Further to our interview on 14 November, we are pleased to offer you a position as Junior Design Engineer, reporting to Technical Director Gordon Murray, commencing Monday, 1 December 1975...
Jack stared at the letter.
1975
The year crystallized in his mind with absolute clarity. This wasn't just the past; this was the past, the pivot point. The foundation year of everything that would define Formula 1 for the next fifty years.
Jack stood up slowly, legs stiff from the cold pavement. His breath misted in the November air as he started walking again, letting his feet carry him through empty Cambridge streets.
I have fifty years of knowledge.
The thought should have been exhilarating. Instead, it felt like a weight pressing down on his chest.
He passed a closed newsstand, tomorrow's papers visible behind the glass. The Guardian showed a grainy photo of Niki Lauda holding a trophy: his first World Championship, won just weeks ago.
His mind ran through the grid like flipping through a mental file cabinet three decades deep. The information wasn't a history lesson; it was a blueprint.
The year was 1975. Niki Lauda had just clinched his first title for Ferrari, cool and precise, the calculated Austrian who treated racing like mathematics. James Hunt was still the playboy, driving for Hesketh Racing, swaggering and chaotic.
But their rivalry was a fire James had watched burn from his childhood armchair. From his seat as a boy, he had watched Lauda lead the standings, watched him fly away with the championship. And then came the sickening, unforgettable horror: Lauda crashed and burned at the Nürburgring in August.
James felt the eight-year-old's terror, the same nausea he'd felt that Sunday. Then, the grim fascination as Hunt started chipping away at the massive points lead. Six weeks later, Lauda was back, his face raw and bandaged, utterly defiant. That image of pure tenacity, the refusal to surrender to fire and death, had imprinted on his young mind, defining what a racing driver truly was. The season had needed the final, rain-soaked race in Japan to decide the title, watching Hunt finally raise the trophy by a single agonizing point.
Not just predicting history, he was reliving a childhood fever dream. This was the era that made Jack fall in love with the sport's drama.
But can I make it? he thought, the fact hitting him with the weight of gold.
This was still the old, dangerous era. Drivers died regularly. Just this August, Mark Donohue had crashed. Death was part of the job description, built into the flawed designs. Safety wouldn't come until the FIA was shamed into it, first through the slow evolution of the 80s, and finally by Senna's death in 1994.
Right now, in 1975, Formula 1 was cigarette sponsorship and canvas racing suits and fuel cells that turned cars into bombs when they crashed. It was also pure. Raw. Before the money became obscene, before corporate politics strangled innovation.
I know what's coming. All of it.
His mind landed on Frank Williams, still years away from building his own cars, still buying customer chassis. Frank didn't know it yet, but he would build an empire.
Ron Dennis was running a Formula 2 team called Project Four. In five years, he would merge with McLaren and create a dynasty.
The ground effect was coming. Colin Chapman would figure it out in 1977. Lotus would dominate with the 78 and 79. Then the FIA would ban it in 1983, and everyone would spend a decade clawing back the lost performance.
Turbos were coming too. In two years, Renault would debut an engine everyone would mock, the "yellow teakettle" that kept breaking down. By 1982, turbos would be king. Teams that didn't adapt would die.
All of this, Jack knew. Knew which teams would rise. Which would fall. Which drivers would become legends and which would be forgotten.
The entire modern era of Formula 1—decades of gladiatorial battles, legendary rivalries, technological revolutions—all of it was compressed into the next thirty years, waiting to unfold.
And Jack remembered every race. Every regulation change. Every technical innovation that would work and every dead-end that teams would waste millions pursuing.
Stopping his pace, he found himself standing in front of his bedsit building, not remembering how he had gotten there.
What am I supposed to do with this?
The strategist in him, the part that had spent thirty-four years calculating tire degradation curves and fuel loads, started running scenarios automatically.
Money first. Five hundred pounds wasn't much, but it was enough if used right. The seventies were unstable ;oil, gold, currencies, everything shifting. Knowing which way things would break, he could make quiet moves. Nothing flashy. Just slow, steady growth to buy time and options.
Next came people. That was what really mattered. Working at Brabham would put him close to those who shaped the sport: Bernie, already pulling strings, and Gordon, seeing things others missed. He didn't need to impress them. He needed to listen, help, and build trust ;connections that would matter later with engineers, designers, and sponsors.
Technology was only part of it. He couldn't drop future designs into the past, but he could guide things. Ask questions that sparked ideas. Point people in directions that felt like their own discoveries.
The goal was clear: build a team. Not buy one, build it. Start small, maybe Formula F3, maybe F2. Earn results. Earn backing. Grow.
He caught himself cataloguing futures again, '79, '84, then let the dates blur. The habit of mapping a life in milestones had cost him patience before. This time the plan would be scaffolding, not a prison built of caution.
He turned the key, the metal cold and exact in his hand, and climbed the narrow stairs. Under his boots the flat creaked like an old engine; outside, somewhere, someone cursed at a pump, a headline changed, a contact folded a cigarette. He felt, for the first time in a long time, like he was starting from the right place.
He climbed the narrow stairs to his bedsit. The room was exactly as he'd left it ;small, cold, smelling faintly of damp and the fish and chips shop downstairs. A single bed in the corner. A desk by the window. Engineering textbooks stacked haphazardly. A poster of the 1974 Brazilian Grand Prix on the wall, Emerson Fittipaldi's McLaren mid-corner.
Jack sat at the desk and spread the Brabham letter out in front of him.
Monday, 1 December 1975. Junior Design Engineer. Reporting to Gordon Murray.
Four days from now, he'll walk into Brabham Racing Organisation. He'd meet Bernie. He'd work alongside Gordon. He'd be inside the paddock, inside the space where history was being made.
And he'd know exactly what was coming.
The weight of it settled on his shoulders ,not quite crushing, but present. Constant.
I will be the winner.
The thought came with force, sharp and clear.
I will dominate this grid.
Not like James. Not the thirty-four years of conservative calls, of chasing reliability over genius. That career ended when Connor Walsh spun and Martin Cross delivered the final verdict: You're not a winner.
No longer would he merely react. This time, with his old mind in a young body, armed with fifty years of compressed history, he would build, not just survive.
He had something else, something James had lost somewhere along the way in those thirty-four years of grinding through the midfield: belief. The conviction that it was possible to build something exceptional. That the dream wasn't just a fantasy young engineers told themselves before reality ground them down.
Jack looked at the poster on his wall. Fittipaldi's McLaren, mid-corner, perfectly balanced. A championship-winning car built by people who believed they could do it.
I can do this.
The grief was still there. Sarah and Emily, the phantom ache of a family that would never exist. That loss would always be with him, a scar that never quite healed.
But underneath it, something else was growing: Purpose. Direction. The sense that maybe, just maybe, being sent back fifty years wasn't punishment. It was an opportunity.
Jack folded the Brabham letter carefully and set it on the desk.
Outside, Cambridge was silent except for the soft patter of rain against the window. Inside, in a cramped bedsit above a fish and chips shop, a twenty-two-year-old engineering graduate sat at a desk and held two contradictory truths at once: he'd lost everything that mattered, and he'd been given a chance to build something that would matter differently.
The rain continued. The night stretched on.
And Jack Hartley who was also James Hartley, who was also something new entirely sat in the darkness and began to plan.