Proof
Back at Oscar's house, Kim Yihyun settled onto the living-room sofa and placed a video call.
It wasn't long before the screen came alive.
His mother had been walking out of the kitchen with the call still going. Her footsteps stopped.
A brief silence.
And then—
Yihyun swallowed a laugh and explained. There would be a few more tests. He would run FP1 on an actual Grand Prix weekend. If nothing went wrong there, the deal would convert into a full contract.
Worry had crept into his mother's voice.
Yihyun thought for a moment.
Heard one way, it was so blunt it sounded almost careless, and for a second he had nothing to say.
But it was also true.
On the far side of the screen, the end of his father's sentence trembled.
Mom was already wiping at the corners of her eyes.
Every hardship up to now seemed to flicker past her. A son who had shown his talent young and dreamed of being a racer.
But racing burned money on a scale almost no other sport could match. Soccer, baseball, basketball—you could throw your own body at those. This was motorsport. You needed a race car, and simply sitting in one ran easily from the hundreds of thousands of dollars into the many millions.
Short of Formula 1 itself, the formulas were not a sport that paid you. They were a sport you paid to do. Karting, a family could still manage. The moment you climbed in earnest into Formula 4, it became something ordinary people could never carry.
And yet.
His mother and father had done it. To make their unremarkable son's dream real, they had emptied their own savings without keeping anything back—and even that wasn't enough, so they had gone out on their own two feet and somehow dragged home sponsors, small as they were.
And now, at last, it was bearing fruit.
In his first life, and in this second one too.
Yihyun smiled, just a little.
Mom and Dad made a sound of perfectly sincere disappointment.
Just then a head poked into the corner of the screen.
Kim Seoa.
His sister's eyes went wide for a moment.
Then she shrugged.
That was what she said.
But it was painfully obvious she was pleased. The corners of her mouth kept twitching, trying to climb.
Not only Seoa. Mom and Dad, Louise, Oscar—inviting all of them was the obvious thing.
In his first life he had shown them a version of himself that disappointed... but well.
This time would be different.
For all the protest, the corner of Kim Seoa's mouth had lifted.
A short sentence.
And more important than anything else she could have said.
The call ended there.
After that, the calendar flew.
May, Italy—the Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari at Imola. June, Britain—Silverstone Circuit. July, Spain—the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya. August, Belgium—the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps.
After the first test, four more came and went without a problem. No—without a problem didn't cover it.
Every time he went out, one of the benchmark lap times the team held was rewritten. Even allowing for the fact that he was running alone in clean air, it was an unmistakably remarkable result.
So the engineers who had been startled at the start were, by the end, taking down the data with faces that said this was simply how things went.
"Kim, that run was good as well."
"Thank you. Next session, I'd like to trim a little more out of sector three."
"......Of course that's the first thing you say. Good. We'll change the tires and send you again."
The Formula 2 season kept running alongside it all.
Kim Yihyun's winning streak held, and not once did he step down from the top of the championship.
Overnight he was a star, and it was only natural that talk of a move to Formula 1 came up in the press conferences.
Of course, for now, the answers were already decided.
"Right now I'm focused on F2."
"I still have room left to grow."
"If a team reaches out, I'll be genuinely grateful."
"The goal, obviously, is F1."
And so the same day repeated itself—for a while.
Late August. Italy. The Autodromo Nazionale Monza.
The last gate in the Mercedes contract: a real Practice 1.
The day he would officially take part in FP1.
Friday morning, as the Italian Grand Prix got underway, the paddock was already full of people.
Second floor of the Mercedes motorhome. The drivers' room.
Kim Yihyun sat on the sofa with the top of his firesuit knotted around his waist, looking at his phone.
An article posted that morning filled the screen.
Under FIA regulations, a team must hand FP1 to a rookie a set number of times over the course of a season. This time, that seat goes to a seventeen-year-old Korean leading the F2 championship.
The session is widely read as more than the mere fulfillment of an obligation—speculation holds that it is a test of whether Kim Yihyun is qualified to sit in a Mercedes seat next year.
...They're not wrong.
Phone still lit, Yihyun leaned back into the sofa.
This FP1 was nothing like the tests so far.
For one thing, unlike every test until now—when there had been no one—there would be a crowd.
And Monza, of all places, was the worst of them for that. The grandstands started filling from Friday morning, and most of the people pouring toward the pit lane wore Ferrari's colors.
This was Monza: a traditional heartland of Formula 1 in the same way Silverstone Circuit is in Britain, Ferrari's home, the birthplace of speed.
Which was why the reporters and the cameras were thicker than usual.
And above all, this time nineteen real Formula 1 drivers would be on the track with him.
Things that had not existed when he ran alone in testing.
Traffic. Teams keeping one another in check. Other drivers' mistakes. It was a completely different world. If the pressure got to him there—if he spun, or made some other mistake...
Make a mistake, and it goes straight out on the broadcast.
A spin in testing might end as a single line of data. A spin in FP1 would be embalmed in that evening's highlight reel and paraded in front of the whole world for everyone to pick apart.
It wouldn't matter whether you were an established driver or a rookie like Kim Yihyun.
...So this is the first gate I have to clear. No exceptions.
The door he had to pass through cleanly, right before he entered Formula 1.
In his first life, he had fallen at this very door.
The memory was still sharp. Early in the session, a handful of purple sectors. Peter Bonnington's admiration coming through the radio.
The moment the radio told him he was doing well, greed took hold.
One more lap. Just a little faster.
Nail it down here, he had thought, and the seat would be secure. And then—he slid through Parabolica and spun.
Straight into the barrier.
He had caused a crash he never meant to cause. When he came back to the garage, not one person on the team raised their voice.
It's all right, they said. These things happen.
Maybe it had only been his imagination that their eyes were different after that day.
But the imagining gnawed at him for a full year and, in the end, crushed him. The result was a release from Mercedes, and a slide to the back of the grid.
So this time has to be different.
Simply not making a mistake wasn't enough.
Today he had to show them. The possibility that he would be a future champion. Whose face would stand for Mercedes from here on.
I have to brand it into them properly.
He was sunk in the thought when—
"Yihyun."
The door opened, and Louise—who had come all the way to Italy with him—stepped in.
"Nervous?"
"No. Not really."
"Yeah? I was going to hug you if you were."
He stalled.
"......Suddenly I am."
"What? You just said you weren't."
"I think I'm a little nervous now."
"What is that. Sneaky."
Louise laughed as if she couldn't believe him. Even so, she sat down beside him and pulled him into a hug.
He stayed in her arms for a while.
When Louise drew her head back, the worry was plain in her eyes.
"There are so many people today. Reporters standing all over outside, too."
"I saw. There really are a lot."
"Honestly, I'm a little shaky. It feels like every one of them came to see you."
"I'm not at that level yet."
"I don't know about that."
Louise brushed a speck of dust from his shoulder.
"To my eyes, it looked like all of them had their attention on you."
"......"
"But you'll be fine. I know you will."
Quiet words, heavy with certainty.
She had worn that same face all through his first life. When a mistake of his got him released. When he barely clung to a seat at the back of the grid and slowly warped under the weight of it.
A woman he owed more than he knew how to say.
"Noona."
"Hm?"
"You look pretty today."
Louise's words caught.
"......Huh?"
"You look pretty today."
"Y-Yihyun. What are you suddenly—"
The tips of her ears were going red. On top of that, her eyes had no idea where to land.
"...What are you saying all of a sudden. That's embarrassing."
"I'm just saying what I see."
"........"
Louise fiddled needlessly with a water bottle.
...Cute.
Yihyun laughed to himself and stood.
"Time to go."
"...Already?"
"Yeah."
Of every Grand Prix on the calendar, the best loved: Italy, Monza, the Temple of Speed.
About forty minutes left until FP1.
Put another way—
The hour of proof had come.