When, after a lengthy absence, race driver Pete Hawthorn is unexpectedly offered the chance to return to the Formula One circuit with Scuderia Vitale, a new F-One team, he jumps at the chance.
His dreams of a bright future are dimmed, though, by a decades-old tragedy: the mysterious disappearance of his race driver father, James, somewhere in the jungle near Rio de Janeiro, where he was competing in the World Cup Rally twenty years before.
Denis Windsor, who owned the team Pete�s farther drove for back then, turns out to also be the moneyman behind the new Vitale team. But Pete puts his suspicions about this doubtful coincidence aside as the team works around the clock to ready the powerful new cars for the first race.
It�s only after the final test session, when Pete and teammate Alberto Vaccarella prove the cars to be fast and reliable enough for the upcoming season, that the past returns with a vengeance as the team arrives at the Circuit Nelson Piquet in Rio de Janeiro.
A multi-million-art theft and multiple murders vie with racing, romance, and the intervention of the Brazilian devil spirit Exu, to resolve the events of the past and make way for future Pete Hawthorne Formula One adventures.