Meet Marc Gene. He's Ferrari's fourth driver, tester number two, and really at the bottom of the food chain since Michael Schumacher arrived to dash his hopes of ever getting to publicly test (let alone sit in, I suspect) the F2008. :( I didn't even think that he was still with the team anymore. I thought they had ditched him, until I read on formula1.com's 2008 Teams Preview that he was still around. What a surprise that was. I mean, talk about underrepresented. That's terribly uncool. So today I sat down and went to the best source on the Web (Wikipedia) to get information on him. Here's what I found:Marc Gene is a Spanish driver, specifically from Catalonia (I wonder if he wants to secede from Spain too!). Like all race car drivers, he drove kart and apparently he was quite successful at it, at least in the Spanish championships, as he was the youngest driver to win the Senior Class of the 1990 Kart Championship in Spain. After that he moved through Formula Ford, British Formula 3, FIA Formula 3000, and all that other stuff before he got signed on to race for Minardi in 1999. He did manage to score points one race and they kept him for 2000, but he got axed at the end of the season and went to Williams/BMW-Williams to test until 2004. After that it was off to Ferrari for more testing alongside Luca Badoer, former Minardi teammate.
Marc Gene seems like a pretty practical guy. He has an economics degree from the University of Buckingham and is trained as an accountant, which is surprising. He actually graduated with honors! And he is fluent in four languages! Pretty darn smart. Right now he's signed up to race for Peugeot at Le Mans again.
Summing up Marc Gene in one phrase? Quote from Pitpass:
"Marc is highly popular and widely acknowledged as one of the sport's true 'nice guys', maybe too nice for F1. Although we will not see Marc racing F1 cars again, he will surely remain one of the leading test drivers."
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