Marco Sammut contested the second round of the FIA Karting Academy Trophy Junior championship in Sarno, Italy

The EKN Driver Diary returns with a focus surrounding the FIA Karting Academy Trophy program. The international championship is into its 17th season, which began with a Junior category and expanded in 2025 to offer a Senior championship. Since the launch of the program in 2010, the United States of America has had a representative in all but three years. The best result to date is the series championship by now NASCAR driver Connor Zilisch in 2020. The driver representing the Red, White and Blue in 2026 is New York driver Marco Sammut. He joins 49 other drivers from across the globe compete in the ‘arrive and drive’ program aboard the Exprit / Vortex / Vega packages.

Sammut is providing EKN with a look into his travel and experience competing at the FIA Karting Academy Trophy Junior program. The first event was held on May 21-24 at the Karting Genk facility in Belgium – article HERE. The second trip was to the Circuito Internazionale Napoli in Sarno, Italy over July 2-5 with his submission below.

Monday, June 29, 2026

Today we flew to Italy. We left New York at 6PM on an overnight flight to Naples, Italy. Mechanic Brandon Jarsocrak came home with us from the United States Pro Kart Series race weekend in New Castle, Indiana. We had a half a day home to pack for Italy, have a nice lunch and do all our laundry to repack, thanks to my mom for that. Travel was uneventful as we tried to get some sleep on the flight.

Tuesday, June 30, 2026

We landed about 8;30am in Naples. We got our rental car and headed to our hotel in Pompeii. The hotel was great with two nice rooms for us. Our room had a nice balcony that overlooked the courtyard of the hotel. We all took quick showers and went sight-seeing in Pompei. Our hotel was about a 5 minute walk to the Pompei historic site. As we walked there for a tour, we bumped into our race friends from Canada Leo da Silva. They were heading to the same place we were, so we decided to go as a group to tour Pompeii.

This was a real fun experience to think what happened here in 79 AD. All these years later we are standing where all these people lived before that tragic day. We had the first of many great pizza lunches as well. We did get to bed early as we were really tired but it was a fun first day in Italy.

Wednesday, July 1, 2026

We woke up early as we were still not adjusted to the time change. Grabbed a nice breakfast and headed to the Sarno track. This was about 20 minutes from our hotel. Brandon and I did a track walk to see what we were going to be dealing with tomorrow. The track seemed fast and flowy. It was really cool as the background of the track was the Mt. Vesuvius volcano. By 10am we were done at the track and we had planned to head to the coast, so off to Positano we went. It was about a 1 hour drive on a twisty cliff side road, was really sketchy. When we got there, we had a nice lunch and then spent the rest of the day on the beach. It was a fun day and a cool place to visit.

Thursday, July 2, 2026

This was our first day for the Academy program. We headed to the track after our breakfast and collected our kart. We spent the better part of the morning setting up the kart and attending the required FIA meetings for the event. The day ended with our one on track session of the day. I had 15 minutes to learn the track and had a great session picking up the basic layout quickly. I ended up this first session in the top five on the time sheet, so I was happy considering this was my first time here. We ended the day at a great restaurant in town and always ended our dinners with gelato. We made sure we got to bed early as tomorrow was a busy and important day.

Friday, July 3, 2026

Today we got to the track early to set up the kart and get ready for our next three practice sessions. All of our sessions went well and we were in the top five in every session, even topping the time sheets free practice one.

Then came qualifying, and that’s when things went all wrong. I went out on our supplied race tires and immediately knew something was wrong. The kart was pulling very badly, and the feel and handling were all wrong compared to the session before. My lap times were really off. They were actually slower than I ran on my first session on the track on Thursday. When we got in, we looked over the kart and found a rear tire that was 1.5cm off in diameter. We showed this to the Vega tire staff, and they said something was defective with this tire. Sadly, there was nothing that I could do and my time was my time.

The next problem was I had a very bad race tire to deal with. We talked again to the Vega staff and they talked to the FIA but they said these were our tires and we were stuck with them. We spent the rest of the day trying to stretch the smaller tire to get it as close as possible to the larger one. This became my dad’s job for the rest of the weekend. We left the track really disappointed as we were way faster than what we showed in qualifying. We went again to a delicious dinner but we felt very upset. The next day we raced so had to focus on that and put qualifying behind us.

Saturday July 4, 2026

Happy Birthday America! We went to the track trying to be optimistic. I knew I had work to do to make sure I made the Final. First up was our warm-up session. We put on our warm-up tires, and the kart was great and I was again toward the top of the time sheet. We had three heat races starting from row eight, and I needed good results. Heat 1 I moved up to ninth and matched that for the second heat race. I improved even more for the third heat, finishing sixth as the biggest mover. Those results put me into the Final, however, I was also disappointed knowing if I started more towards the front the results could have been even more amazing. We did get the bad tire better by stretching it all day and the kart did feel more normal after this. We headed to the hotel for a shower then walked to town for another great meal and of course gelato!

Sunday, July 5, 2026

This was the final day and I was ready. We had a great warm-up and I knew anything could happen in the Final. Our starting position was 17th, which we know can be chaotic. I thought I could get myself to the top five if all went well. The race started the way I wanted. I got a good start and in the first few laps made my way into the top 10. Then I got tangled with the winner from Round One as he swerved me. This caused us to crash and I tumbled down the order. I put my head down and worked hard to get back to 18th.

This was a disappointing result as I feel we had great potential for a top 5 finish. We spent the rest of the day packing up the kart feeling really upset but what could we do. We had fun watching the FIA KZ Finals. We then went to a pool that was at the track with other racers and had fun trying to forget all the things that went wrong. We went back to the hotel for our last evening, had another nice evening in town and tried to make the most of a disappointing day.

Monday, July 6, 2026

We had to wake up super early to get to our flight home. This was just a long day of travel back to NYC. All in all, a wonderful trip, just sad that tire really derailed what could have been an amazing race weekend. I am focused on the final round of this amazing series. I can’t wait to head back to Italy in October for the last race. Until then, I have more racing in the USA and will be starting high school in September.

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