Meet the 20-year-old Kelowna racer conquering the track

Marco Kacic’s racing journey has some impressive accomplishments.

He started at age five racing go kart’s, and was competitive by age seven. By 15, he signed with a team, Exclusive Autosport, to compete in the Canadian Formula 1600 Championship as the youngest driver.

In 2019, he made his debut with Doran Motorsports Group in the F4 Formula Pro USA Winter Series. Not only did Marco win his debut F4 race, he completely dominated, winning by over 27 seconds.

Now, 20 years old, he is gearing up to race in Germany at the legendary Hockenheimring. He’ll be piloting an LMP3 car, which can reach speeds of over 300 km/h in the Prototype Cup at the end of April.

“I spent the last couple of years in the F3 car, it’s an open-wheel car, it’s kind of what I’m used to at this point,” Kacic told Kelowna10. “I was able get a little bit of simulation practice on the LMP3 so I can get an idea for the car feel, but I won’t know exactly what it’s going to feel like until the day. But that’s what we train for as drivers.”

He’s currently part of the non-profit Road to Racing Program, an organization that supports amateur motorsport athletes in Canada. He is 100 per cent sponsorship funded.

Funding is an important role to help drivers if they want to make it to the professional ranks. That’s something Kacic is looking for himself like many of the up-and-coming drivers who aspire to reach the Formula One ranks.

“They’ve designed a company that allows people to work with drivers for charitable donations. So that helps a lot of companies to help invest in some drivers, do some charitable donations to help out… so they can succeed in their career,” he explained.

And while his progress has slowed the last few years because of COVID and visa issues, Kacic is looking to get back on track.

“It slowed down the big run I had going as a young up and comer, but it hasn’t slowed me down as a driver,” he said. “It did change our approach, and it made it difficult to drum up sponsorship funding for the last couple of years. So, we really had to rethink how we were doing things and be more careful about how we’re doing things.”

The rest of his year will see him race four times in Germany and twice in France. He hopes to get a few races under his belt in North America as well.