In hot pursuit

MANILA, Philippines - You just want to break sometimes, but that’s part of anything — whether it’s your job, or a sport. You have to force yourself sometimes,” Marlon Stockinger says. “Every athlete, to a certain extent, will feel that it’s tedious to do the same thing over and over.” He’s describing the ups and downs of his jet-set life, which includes a lot of airports, and a lot of cars — the latter because he’s an international racer, and the former because there aren’t many places to train in his own country. “For the most part I live in Switzerland, but most of the time I just live on a plane.”

Such is the nonchalance of the 20-year-old about the fact that he’s been living independently since he started racing professionally at age 15, and in foreign countries no less. “Training could be in Hungary one day, and Italy the next. Sometimes we don’t know where we’re going to go until the very last minute. It can be anywhere in the world as long as there is a racetrack. I’ve probably racked up quite a few thousand miles.”

The racer received a personal tour of the racetrack from his father more than a decade ago, and the rest, as they say, is history. “It was a really genuine experience and I’d never felt anything like it before. I just wanted to do it more and more after my first time.”

When you’re a globe-trotting racer, you’ll need all the technological help you can get to stay connected.

Which is not to say, of course, that the road has been filled only with expensive cars and the perceived glamour that comes with racing in high-profile categories such as the Formula One Renault, where he also became the first-ever Filipino to win. “With your family here, you grow up a bit clingy. I grew up that way, so it was really difficult to have to leave my family and friends. I found the first year to be especially hard,” admits Marlon. “But it’s also a liberating experience. You find out that you can live on your own — you don’t have to have the social network you’ve grown accustomed to or live in your own home to be able to survive. I fend for myself, and that’s something no one can take away from me.”

“The whole reason I’m doing this is to get to Formula One. It’s been my goal ever since, and I’ve been racing all my life,” Globe Tattoo’s latest endorser says. The path of least resistance has long been discarded in favor of this pursuit, and the truth is that this — commuting from one country to the next to get to a racetrack, casting aside social and academic interaction in the hopes of driving into the Grand Prix — is not for everyone.

“Once you realize that you’re in a good position to pursue your career, you’ll know that you can always come back. The Philippines is never going to leave.” The fast and the furious know no limits when it comes to pushing themselves — especially when you’re racing a GP3, a car only two levels below Formula One, after you’ve just turned 20. “To be fair, in the position I’m in, I should feel very blessed. And I do.”