Marcelo conquers odds in big Macau win

Shipment delay cost the Philippines’ ace karter Stefano Marcelo of Maranello-San Miguel Corporation-Marcelo Racing the Asian title, but he staged a courageous rally in the final race to rule the championship round of the 2008 Asian Karting Open Championship recently at the Kartodromo de Coloane Circuit in Macau.

The delay in the shipment of his new engines proved detrimental for the 16-year-old Marcelo, who lost the Asian crown by just three points to Thailand’s Tin Sritrai, 122-125.

He clocked 18 minutes and 22.819 seconds in the 25-lap final race, just four-tenths of a second ahead of runner-up Sritrai’s 18:23.044 and Indonesian third placer Nanin Indrapayong’s 18:23.334. 

He wasn’t as lucky in the KF1 Championship, but put on one amazing show. With an old engine, he only qualified 18th in the time trials and managed to move up two places in the qualifying heats. Even when the new engine arrived, he suffered another misfortune in the pre-final when spark plug problems caused his engine to cease in the middle of the track.

But Stefano put up a good fight in the KF1 final race. He started dead last at 24th but managed to move up 15 places to an incredible ninth place by the second corner. However, he figured in another accident causing his rear bumper to partially come off three laps into the race that prompted race officials to send him back to the pit.

“We got a call from the shippers that our engines will be delayed and that left the team scrambling to get last year’s engine to Macau and rebuild it to optimum settings for the qualifying sessions,” said Marcelo.

However, the old engine was no match against this year’s updated versions used by his rivals. And the predicament of having only one KF2 and one KF1 engine added pressures and worries for the team having no spare engines in case of mishaps.

True enough, mishaps were Friday’s story as the team ended up rebuilding the engines five times as they would seize at each practice session as Stefano would try his best to extract the most power from them.

He was running a strong second in the first qualifying heat until his engine seized while trying to keep up with the pack and forced him out of the race. On the second heat, he was leading the race until the last five laps when his engine again conked out.

In Saturday morning’s third heat, he managed to secure second place while conserving the engine to the finish line but that only left him starting 20th on the grid for the pre-final race.

Luckily, the engines arrived just in time to install them for the pre-finals. That boosted confidence for Marcelo who sent the crowd cheering as he raged like a bull passing one kart after another to climb up fourth place after the short 18-lap pre-final.

Calculating his chances, Stefano had to win the last race and hope Sritrai to finish lower than fourth place. He moved up third at the start of the final race but Sritrai and Indrapayong came off strong pulling a wide gap from the Filipino ace karter.

An accident at the first corner forced officials to hoist the red flag, giving Stefano a breather and the team enough time to improve the carburetor settings.

When the action resumed, the changes proved effective as Marcelo passed both Sritrai and Indrapayong midway and preserve his grip of the lead all the way to the finish line.