Mercedes GT3 star Raffaele Marciello
Raffaele Marciello once appeared to be Ferrari’s next Italian F1 star, but is now under the pay of its German arch-rival in GTS – and he’s very happy with his life
When Raffaele Marciello says“i don’t feel below guys that are in Formula 1”, he means it. Ranked 48th in Autosport’s top 50 drivers of 2020, below 12 from F1, the works Mercedes-amg GT star is an in-demand 26-year-old who is content with his lot. After all, he’s racing great cars all over the world and is regarded as one of the best in his field.
Take this year’s activities. Marciello is set to compete in the GT World Challenge Europe, ADAC GT Masters and the Nurburgring Langstrecken Serie. He’s already finished second in class in the Daytona 24 Hours, and scored two class poles in the four-race Asian Le Mans Series. Over the past three years, he has contested an average of 20.3 race meetings per season, including 21 in Covid-impacted 2020.
Seven years ago, Marciello was the reigning Formula 3 European champion as a Ferrari junior. But given the choice of trading places with Alfa Romeo F1 driver
Antonio Giovinazzi, who usurped him as the Italian golden boy of the Ferrari Driver Academy, Marciello is clear that he wouldn’t change anything.
“It’s not a matter of money, it’s not a matter of fame or whatever,” he explains. “I’m a racer, doing over 30 races per year and driving the best tracks in the world, so I’m happy.
If I have to choose between trying to win the best GT races or Antonio trying to fight for P15, I take mine. Every time I go on track I can push, there is less bullshit, less politics.
I’m not really a political guy; I like to say what I think.
That is not really the best in F1, so I think I’ve found my place and I’m happy here.”
Marciello was immediately on the pace when he switched to GTS with Jerome Policand’s Auto Sport Promotion Mercedes team in 2017, and his starring role in that year’s Spa 24 Hours, when he drove for over 14 hours and had to depart the podium for medical attention, confirmed him as one of sportscar racing’s coming men. He was given factory driver status the following year and won the overall Blancpain GT Series and Sprint Cup titles, only losing a clean sweep in the Endurance Cup when the rival Black Falcon Mercedes squad successfully appealed its exclusion for a technical infringement at the Barcelona finale. In 2019, Marciello survived constant pressure from Laurens Vanthoor and Earl Bamber to add the GT
World Cup in Macau to his bulging CV, before helping the unheralded Timur Boguslavskiy to claim the overall GTWCE title in 2020, with pole positions at Spa and Barcelona – by a whopping 0.68 seconds – among the standout moments.
“One of my strengths is that I can adapt pretty quickly to everything,” he says. “If the car maybe is not in the best set-up, if it starts to rain and you’re on slicks or on a new track, normally I don’t need many laps to be on the pace.”
That point was recognised by Prema Powerteam boss
Rene Rosin after the 17-year-old Marciello had dominated both
FIA F3 European Championship races at Pau in 2012. It was his first time on a street circuit, and he had impressively bounced back from a practice shunt to qualify on pole. “He has speed in his heart,” Rosin observed. “He can immediately get on the limit.”
As a Ferrari junior, Marciello truly appeared destined for the very top. He ran current AMG stablemate Daniel Juncadella uncomfortably close to the 2012 FIA F3 and parallel F3 Euro Series titles (see panel), and beat Felix Rosenqvist to the now consolidated FIA F3 crown in 2013, with 13 wins. “When you’re young and they say you are the new Italian future star, maybe you feel invincible, but you are not,” reflects Marciello. “With experience, you learn to listen more to people, what is important and what is not. This is something that maybe I missed in the past.”
A promising GP2 season followed in 2014 with Racing Engineering. There were a few rookie mistakes, but anyone watching his charging feature race victory in the wet at Spa, where he passed Stoffel Vandoorne with two laps to go, could be in little doubt that Marciello was a real talent. So where did it go wrong? The answer lies in a move to Trident for 2015, at a time when Ferrari was in a state of flux following the departure of Stefano Domenicali the previous year. Marco Mattiacci lasted mere months before being replaced by Maurizio Arrivabene, while long-standing chairman Luca di Montezemolo handed over to Sergio Marchionne.
“This was the key year, the bad one,” says Marciello. “I was in the wrong moment in the wrong time when everything in Ferrari was changing, so I was in the limbo of everyone changing and
I think there we took the wrong choice of team…”
While Alexander Rossi took his seat at Racing Engineering and finished second to runaway champion Vandoorne, Marciello didn’t win a race and only once finished on the podium in a feature race. He had four Friday outings with the Ferrari-affiliated Sauber team, but that too was a team in strife – it had been taken to court for signing three drivers to fill its two race seats.
“It was nice at the beginning because everything is new, but it was like a small team that didn’t bring so many updates and I didn’t learn so much because every briefing was pretty much the same,” he says. “I was close to being in F1 [for 2015] when Domenicali was still there, but then with the new bosses not anymore because they wanted me to win [GP2] with Trident. I said, ‘If you want me to win, put me in a better car’, but it was their idea and it was not possible. I think I drove pretty much OK with what I had.”
Marciello split with Ferrari prior to his 2016 season with the
“WHEN THEY SAY YOU ARE THE NEW ITALIAN FUTURE STAR, MAYBE YOU FEEL INVINCIBLE, BUT YOU ARE NOT”
Virtuosi-run Russian Time squad, and he finished equal on points with Sergey Sirotkin, behind only Prema duo Pierre Gasly and Giovinazzi. But by season’s end, he recognised the F1 dream was over and there was never any question of carrying on for a fourth season: “I was tired of it. I said, ‘I don’t see the point’. I see drivers that do four or five years, they are 25 and still pushing for this. For me, it’s useless.” He took quickly to GTS and has never looked back.
“As soon as he started GT, he closed the book of single-seaters,” confirms Policand. “He never, never mentions that he won in GP2. It’s not like, ‘This guy in F1, I was beating him in GP2 and F3’.
There are some drivers that always regret the old days and it is not the case with Lello. He just enjoys racing.”
That much is evident when Marciello, who cites Robert Kubica as his favourite driver, reveals that he raced a humble SEAT Leon in an endurance race at Adria in 2019 – “We were leading and in the last
hour the clutch broke” – and finished 12th on the same year’s Rally Monza in a Citroen C3 R5, with manager Alessandro Nolli Brianzi co-driving. “I would like to do some more Rally of Monza – not proper rally because I will crash pretty much straight away!” he laughs. “I like everything. If a car has four wheels, I like to do it.”
Marciello has a long list of series he wants to sample, from Brazilian V8 Stock Cars to Australian Supercars, stadium super trucks and even the Dakar Rally. “I’m speaking with Alessandro every winter like, ‘When we are 40 or 50, we have to do Dakar together,’” he says. “He’s a very passionate driver,” adds Policand. “He knows the history of F1, GT – he is not just about driving.”
Money may not be a key motivator for Marciello, but there can be no doubt over his worth to Policand, who when speaking to Autosport last December called him the team’s “biggest asset”. “There are some drivers in GT3 who are able to be very fast and I think they are able to match him over one lap, but with a very good car,” Policand said. “Lello is still able to be in front with an average car. When we won the Sprint series with Lello [in 2018], our car was not good enough to win at the Nurburgring. We were average. But Lello wins the race…
“He’s very smooth on the steering wheel, his input is just perfect. When he turns in, he turns in, that’s it. He never crosses his hand or tries to catch an apex at the last moment. You never feel he is at maximum attack. You can see it’s very quick, he’s at the edge of the car, but he’s not like some drivers making a lot of effort on the steering wheel and going sideways. He’s always very relaxed.”
And there’s another quality that Policand admires too: “He’s a good team player, he knows exactly what he wants in the car. He’s not complicated and that builds the confidence of the team.”
Marciello reckons it’s unlikely we’ll see a GT driver crack the top 10 of Autosport’s 50 best drivers of the year, “because GT is difficult to judge”. But he may yet prove himself wrong…