Sunday 11 March 2012

Marcus "The Goose" Carniel racing driver - career to date

          Part 2         
Marcus pursued by Pete Morris on
the way to taking the win at Snetterton.

 As the 2010 season came to a close Marcus was leading the points table. However, a competitor’s two lowest scores are deducted from their overall total. Chris Dyer in class 2 had an earlier Exclusion (for deliberately driving into another competitor, throwing him into the barrier) and was allowed to use this as a dropped score– something which was ambiguous from the Regulations (which have since been changed) and also thought of as “wrong” both morally and by their interpretations of the Regulations by most of Marcus’ peer group of class 1 competitors. Class 2 had far fewer competitors, making wins easier to come by and consequently Chris Dyer was determined the 2010 champion. Although not the overall champion, Marcus’ results were thought of as a much greater achievement than Dyer who was favoured by the system and awarded the championship.  So whilst disappointed with the way things were determined Marcus was still pleased to be overall Runner Up and Class One Champion.


In front of class 1 cars
at Donington Park

 In 2011 he sold the car (to Porsche and motorsport enthusiast Nigel Braithwaite) and as he had intended to do 2 years previously, decided to take that well deserved year off. However, the temptation of racing once again proved too much. He rented a 944 S2 at the Donington Park round, claiming that it was the curiosity of racing the car which he had deemed to be more competitive than the 911 SC. However it seems more likely to be a trivial need to rate his performance against Dyer.

 This battle ended up with Marcus, in a rented car he hadn’t driven before, out qualifying Dyer by some 2.5 seconds. This individual test later resulted in him gaining the best results Marcus had ever had, a “full house” of 2 poles, 2 class fastest laps and 2 class wins.
After such a striking performance he booked the car for the Oulton Park round too. He qualified 3rd overall and 2nd overall for the 2 races and numerous grid places ahead of the other class two cars. He finished the first race 4th, pipping class 1 968 driver Ben Demetriou to the place by just 2/1000th of a second as they crossed the line, but the second race came to an abrupt end when he was punted off track about 30 seconds into the race, hit the barrier hard, rolled the car 3 times and wrote it off.
Another car was built for him just in time for the final round at Silverstone at the UK’s largest endurance race, the Britcar 24 hour (as contended by BBC’s Top Gear presenters), and he qualified on class pole for races 1 and 2. This allowed him to secure class 3rd in the whole championship. An astounding achievement after only contending in 3 of the 8 rounds (and writing off a car in one of them!).
                       

No comments:

Post a Comment