Welcome to my World (Practice) – Marcus Kaerup
At 16-years of age he is already a double European Champion and 12-months ago on his World Championship debut he made both the 2WD and 4WD finals in Arizona but that’s in 1:10 electric. This week however Marcus Kaerup is in Spain for the larger and noisier IFMAR 1:8 Offroad World Championship, the power and noise for the Dane’s efforts coming his Ruddog RNX22.3 engine, the German brand also supporting Red RC’s coverage from the event. In the first of our daily columns following his progress at the spectacular sloping RC Redovan track, we caught up with Marcus to get a quick round up of how the first 3-days of practice has faired for him in his ‘second class’.
Not Marcus’ first rodeo on the biggest 1:8 Buggy stage in the World, having raced at the exact same location 2-years ago, he still classifies himself as a bit of a 1:8 newbie. Racing since he was just 3-years-old, that very early start was most likely influenced by his dad Jonas being a former 1:10 Electric Touring Car Champion. While having a very impressive CV in 1:10 Offroad, Marcus explains that while he ‘drives some nitro here & there’, he doesn’t get the time for much nitro testing and so he is ‘pretty new’ to the class. Still, he competes here in Spain as the recently crowned Danish National Champion and he comes here with strong ambitions, ‘if you don’t go for win why even show up. I have set myself a pretty high goal.’ Asked what he thinks of his playground for the week, he said ‘It’s an amazing track, really challenging for everyone, even the top guys from the US and Europe are struggling with 10-minutes or 5-minutes without crashing.’
While he normally races with his father by his side, work commitments meaning that’s not the case here, but one could say his ‘stand in’ pitman isn’t too shabby. That pitman is none other than Team Associated team manager Brent Thielke. Brent has vast experience of working with young up & coming talents and has been a big contributor to AE’s ever increasing tally of 32 World Championship wins.
38th in Monday’s free practice and 25th in Tuesday’s seeding Marcus finished out practice in positive form. ‘The last seeding run was pretty good for me. We are just working and working and working and now I think I have found something I want to drive with for the rest of the event’. Explaining what he had found he said, ‘Overall pace and comfort in the car, I found that now so I just need to drive it now instead of focusing on one lap’. Looking to qualifying he added, ‘I think for the qualifying it’s going to be better for me because you focus on the long run and not on every single lap you do, for me its more comfortable driving.’
We will catch up with Marcus again to see how the opening three qualifiers that make up Day 1 of qualifying fair out.
