Leo was already moving before his conscious mind had processed that the lights had gone out.
The launch off the line was clean.
Not the cleanest in the field — he could see through the first corner that three or four cars ahead had gotten off the line quicker, their rear tyres finding traction on the left side of the grid boxes where the rubber had been laid down by the formation lap warm-up. His side of the grid — P10, the right side of the track — had less of that rubber. The tyre had needed an extra tenth to fully load.
He had lost one car length to the pack in the first fifty metres.
He made it back in the next fifty.
The engine produced the specific, raw bark of a power unit being asked for everything at once — not the controlled delivery of a qualifying lap where you wanted the power on early but precisely, but the blunt, maximum output of a race start where precision was secondary to being somewhere other than last into the first corner.
