RIVAL’S VIEW
“FROM THE START I KNEW HE’D BE TOUGH TO BEAT”
Relatively little was expected of Raffaele Marciello when he joined Prema for the 2012 F3 Euro Series. Team-mate Daniel Juncadella was entering his third season and had won the previous year’s Macau Grand Prix, so was banking on showing the way to this young graduate of the Italian F3 Championship. But already in testing, Marciello was on his case, prompting a frank exchange with Juncadella’s engineer John Mcgill when the young upstart was able to carry an extra 5km/h through the final fourth-gear left-hander at Misano.
“I was having a lot of oversteer and he was having understeer, so I said to my engineer, ‘I cannot do this corner like him’,” Juncadella recalls. “He was telling me that Raffaele was turning aggressively like [Fernando] Alonso was doing in his Renault F1 days, forcing the understeer to carry more speed into the corner. So I tried and I spun in the last corner. I was super-frustrated! Then my engineer says, ‘Well, [Giancarlo] Fisichella couldn’t do it either…’ He was a rookie apparently and all the expectations were on me, but from the very beginning I realised he was going to be tough to beat.”
Juncadella prevailed in their intra-team battle – which got physical at the Norisring, for which the Spaniard was excluded – but came away full of admiration for his rival.
Afterwards, both clocked up
Friday FP1 mileage in F1
(Juncadella with Force India in 2014), but neither made the final step into a race seat. “I really thought he was going to get his [F1] chance,” Juncadella says. “He ticked all the right boxes.”
Their careers have aligned again in GTS. They were reunited at ASP for three races in the 2018 Blancpain GT Endurance Cup, and now Marciello and Juncadella are teaming up with fellow AMG factory driver Jules Gounon for an assault on the GT
World Challenge Europe Endurance Cup with ASP this year.
“Last year I would rate him as, just like Autosport did, the best GT3 driver, and around the AMG atmosphere together with Maro Engel, I think they were the benchmarks,” says Juncadella. “This year we just need to be smart with each other. We have the speed, we have everything. It’s only up to us to f*** it up at this point!”