Two championship wins for young Rookie

Phillip Island  -  23rd October, 2011.   

In a nail bighting finish to the 2011 Formula Ford 1600 racing season, young Victorian rookie, Lockie Marshall continued his run of speed and consistency to take out the both the CAMS Victorian Circuit Racing Championship and the Formula Ford Association Formula Ford 1600 Championship in his Spectrum 010B.

Competing at the picturesque Phillip Island GP Circuit, the field of 15 drivers endured variable conditions on the Friday and Saturday and raced under near perfect conditions on Sunday for the all important final.

After qualifying 2nd to team mate Scott Andrews (former Commodore Cup young gun) Race 1 saw Marshall come home third to Andrews and second placed Greg Woodrow in his Mygale.

In Race 2 Marshall started off on row two and made a clean pass on Woodrow early in the race to come home second to Andrews with a sizable gap to third placed Adrian Lazzaro who held a comfortable margin on Marshall in the championship points standing.

With the triple points weighting for Race 3 (the final race of the series) the championship was still alive with Marshall needing to finish 7 places ahead of Lazzaro to secure the title. With Marshall off P2 and Lazzaro off P3 the lights went out and Lazzaro had a disastrous start and was immediately passed by a number of cars before he got his Spectrum up to speed. Andrews and Marshall opened up an early gap which saw Lazzaro chasing through the midfield and as he started to make up the places he needed to secure the championship contact was made with another car that saw Lazzaro off the track and caught in a sand trap. Marshall went on to take second from team mate Andrews which was enough to take the win in the CAMS championship.

In an "In Pit Lane" interview after the race, Marshall commented that he was "extremely happy to win both Championships and I am very grateful for the help provided by my engineer Sean Scott, he did a fantastic job tuning the chassis and being my driver coach". Marshall also thanked his team mate Scott  Andrews for his help through the season. "Scott has been great and I have learnt a lot from him this year" he commented.

"I am looking forward to 2012 now as I will be competing in the Australian Formula 3 championship which will be an enormous challenge for me and Dad, and Tim Macrow who will be engineering the car for us" Lockie said.

Marshall joins the ranks of notable drivers like Will Davison and Jamie Whincup who have won the Victorian Formula Ford 1600 Championship in their first year of racing.