Summer 1951
The sound hit first.
It wasn't just loud—it was layered. The sharp bark of high-compression engines at full song, the deeper thunder of downshifts, the metallic clatter of valves pushed beyond their comfort. The air itself seemed to vibrate, heavy with burned oil, hot rubber, and gasoline that had never known a filter.
Arthur felt all of it before he understood any of it.
Heat pressed against his face. Sunlight reflected off polished aluminum and curved bodywork, stabbing his eyes. He staggered one step sideways and nearly fell, boots slipping on oil-stained concrete that absolutely did not belong to any modern paddock he had ever seen.
This isn't right.
He looked down. His hands weren't his hands.
They were rougher. Scarred. The nails were short and blackened with grease that hadn't come from a keyboard or a CAD mouse. He wore a white linen shirt, already damp with sweat, sleeves rolled to the elbow in a way no modern engineer would tolerate.
Ahead of him, a red car screamed past the pit wall.
Long nose. Rounded tail. Wire wheels shuddering under load.
Painted on the flank, in hand-laid white script:
Veloce 1500 Corsa
Straight-six.
Arthur's breath caught.
The car dove into a corner far too fast for its mass. He could see it—the front loading up, the outside tire screaming in protest, the long iron engine sitting too far ahead of the axle. The steering wheel in the driver's hands would be fighting back now, every kilogram of that engine demanding obedience physics would not grant.
"Troppo pesante…" someone muttered nearby.
Too heavy.
The Veloce pushed wide.
The driver corrected once. Twice. The chassis flexed, the suspension geometry collapsing under forces it was never designed to handle. Arthur's mind raced ahead of the moment, already calculating weight distribution, polar moment, unsprung mass—
The car snapped.
Not violently. Not dramatically.
Just enough.
The rear stepped out. The front lost bite. The Veloce slid sideways, kissed the hay bales, and then something inside the engine let go with a sound Arthur would never forget: a deep, wet crack, followed by silence.
No explosion. No fireball.
Just the sudden absence of sound where an engine should have been.
The crowd gasped as one.
Arthur didn't move.
He couldn't.
Because standing beside him, clutching the pit wall with white-knuckled hands, was a man he somehow knew more intimately than himself.
Vincenzo Veloce.
His father.
Vincenzo's face had gone ashen, his eyes fixed not on the broken car, but on the empty stretch of track beyond it—as if willing the last ten years of his life to reverse themselves.
"No…" he whispered.
Then his hand slipped.
Vincenzo sagged forward, breath hitching once, twice—then failing to come at all.
Arthur caught him on instinct.
The weight in his arms was real. Terrifyingly real.
"Papa!" someone shouted.
Arthur lowered him to the ground, hands trembling, heart hammering not with fear but with recognition. He knew this posture. He knew this stillness. He knew what it meant when a body suddenly became heavier instead of lighter.
The world blurred.
Voices collapsed into noise. The smell of fuel mixed with incense. Somewhere, a bell rang.
The funeral passed like a dream Arthur hadn't agreed to have.
Black suits. Stone walls. Latin words he didn't understand but somehow felt. Candles flickering against old frescoes that had watched centuries of men be born and buried without caring which was which.
He stood where he was told to stand. He nodded when people spoke. He accepted embraces from men who smelled of tobacco and oil, women who whispered condolences like rehearsed lines.
All the while, his mind screamed.
This isn't my life.
This isn't my time.
This isn't my world.
But every time he tried to grasp onto that thought, another memory surfaced—of factory floors, of late nights beside his father, of pride mixed with frustration as they built cars too beautiful to survive their own economics.
Those memories were his now.
When the last mourner left and the iron gates of the Veloce factory closed behind him, silence finally settled.
Arthur walked the floor alone.
The building was old, pre-war. Brick and steel. Shafts of moonlight cut through high windows, illuminating dust motes drifting over half-finished dreams. Cars sat under cloths like sleeping animals. Engine blocks rested on wooden pallets, heavy and unapologetic.
On a drafting table lay the blueprint.
Veloce 1500 – Straight Six
Arthur stared at it for a long time.
Six cylinders. Long crankshaft. Thick walls. Cast iron everywhere because aluminum was expensive and trust was cheap. The engine was beautiful in the way a cathedral was beautiful—grand, impressive, and utterly indifferent to the cost of maintaining it.
He reached for a pencil.
His hand hesitated.
Then, slowly, deliberately, he drew a red line.
Not across the whole drawing.
Just through the last two cylinders.
Four cylinders remained.
Shorter crank. Less mass. Less friction. Faster warm-up. Cheaper machining. A chance—just a chance—to make something that could live instead of merely impress.
Arthur exhaled.
In the quiet factory, surrounded by the ghosts of artisan pride and financial denial, the future of Veloce began not with a roar—
—but with subtraction.