Minutes passed. The audience grew restless. Preston checked his watch with theatrical boredom. Five minutes: the needle held steady. Ten minutes: still steady.
Derek Sullivan smirked. "Looks like everything's normal to me. What a surprise."
Raymond raised one finger. "Wait."
Twelve minutes. Fourteen minutes. Sixteen minutes.
At minute 17, it happened: the needle dipped, barely—a movement so small that most eyes missed it entirely. Then it recovered.
Raymond pointed. "There. Did you see that?"
Victoria Ashford leaned forward. "I saw something. A tiny movement."
"A drop of 0.4 PSI," Raymond said. "Less than half a pound of pressure for maybe two seconds."
Preston laughed. "That's nothing. That's within normal tolerance. Every fuel system has minor fluctuations."
Raymond turned to face him. His voice remained calm, patient, like a teacher explaining something to a slow student. "In a modern fuel-injected engine, you would be correct. The computer compensates for minor variations, adjusts the fuel mixture automatically; the driver never notices."
He gestured toward the Ferrari. "But this is not a modern engine. This is a 1962 carbureted system: no computer, no automatic compensation. It expects perfectly consistent fuel pressure."
He paused to let the words sink in. "That 0.4 PSI drop creates a momentary lean condition—not enough to trigger any warning, not enough to register on digital diagnostics that average their readings over time, but enough for the engine to stumble, to hesitate. And sometimes, when conditions align perfectly wrong, to stall completely."
Victoria Ashford was writing furiously. This was something no technician had identified in 18 months of trying.
"Interesting theory," Derek said, his voice having lost some of its mockery. "But what's causing the pressure drop? We've tested every fuel system component: the pump is perfect, the filter is new, the lines were inspected."