Marino’s passion for motor racing is home-grown: “I come from a family whose true passion is automobiles and racing. Both my grandfathers loved cars, and my father, my brother and cousins all share that same love. My father club-raced Formula Fords and Atlantics, but retired from racing soon after I was born.”

A true devotee of the sport, Marino started in karts at age eight and counts among his heroes Jackie Stewart, Derek Bell and Jim Clark, drivers who were fast in whatever they drove. By the end of 2001, Marino’s first year of sports car racing, he had won the British GTO Championship taking eight wins and three second places along the way. He began racing in the American Le Mans Series in 2002 and has raced in it every year since, never full time, but he has successfully driven a wide variety of sports cars in North America as well as in Europe, among them: Porsche GT3RS, Audi S4, Nissan-Lola B2K/40, Ferrari 430, Crawford Pontiac Daytona Prototype, Panoz Esperante GTLM, GTS Dodge Viper, Maserati MC12, and Lamborghini Murcielago R-GT, and like all good drivers and his heroes before him, he can get into any car and do well.

Last year he raced the Acura LMP2 car with a season best of second overall at Houston. “2007 was a good year for me, but this year I will have the added benefit of being able to tap into the huge experience of both the Dyson team and my Dyson teammates and sharing a car with Butch Leitzinger will be great. When I first came over to America, I was introduced to Butch, Chris, James Weaver and Rob Dyson and they were all very friendly, then in 2005 Butch and I worked together at Crawford in the 24 Hours of Daytona. You always keep in touch with teams like Dyson because they are achievers as well as being legends synonymous with the history of our sport, and you always hope that one day there might be one of those ‘never to be missed opportunities’ that come your way. So driving for Dyson Racing is like a dream come true and now that I am here I am really looking forward to this season and building on the sixty one wins the team already has. Too many series today are trying to control everything on the cars, but sports car racing and the American Le Mans Series is about innovation and pushing forward the boundaries of technology.”

Marino is as much a race enthusiast as any die-hard fan in the stands. When Marino is not in a car, he is either training, as he takes his exercise programs very seriously, or he is looking for racing events to visit or books on racing to read.