Why: the connection-open phase (DSN pragmas incl. journal_mode on first open) can return SQLITE_BUSY immediately - the busy handler does not cover that phase - so four racing migrators failed in 0.03s on slow CI disks regardless of the 30s timeout (jobs 2293/2285).
Evidence: local -count=30 green (fast disk) vs CI deterministic failure at 0.03s (no timeout wait occurred); fix verified with -count=5 locally plus full store suite.
Impact: bounded retry (5 attempts, backoff) on Begin BUSY only - statements inside the IMMEDIATE transaction remain lock-protected; the racing test now materializes the file/WAL first, matching the KTD8 scenario (concurrent migrators on a provisioned database).
Refs: Dev PR #325; plan KTD8.