Marshal Law

I had a fantastic time at Brands Hatch at the weekend. I've made a lot of friends up there, and haven't seen many of them since before christmas so it was good to catch up with them, and get back into the swing of being a marshal. No longer the trainee I was last year, but a fully fledged track marshal, and what a way to start, with one of the biggest race meetings of the year, A1GP. If you don't know what that it is, its basically a form of single seater racing, where all of the cars are the same (none of this fancy double diffuser nonsense), and each car is driven by a different country. Whoever goes the fastest and finishes first wins, simple as. Plus all the support races that go along with it, which I won't list, I can already see people dozing off at the keyboard as they read this.
So, being a marshal basically entails ensuring the safety of the drivers and that everyone is following the rules. If only someone had told the drivers this, but onto that in a minute.
First challenge of the day, getting into the little marshals hut at post 6. You'd think one of the 8 of us would figure out how to open a stuck door. Track maintenence had a novel approach; a spade. wedge it in the right place and the door pops open, result!! Netx challenge, check the fire extinguishers, without setting them off. My fellow marshal Richard is very insistant that when he tipped it up, the pin " just fell out". I never realised that the powder in an extinguisher is pink, salmon pink really. by the time powder had stopped spraying everywhere, everywhere was salmon pink; the tyre wall, the inside of the hut, me etc.
Anyway, back to what we really do at the track; driver safety and rule obeying. anyone on here planning to try their hand at racing, please note:
1. You drive on the grey stuff (i.e tarmac), not the gravel or the grass. We tend to get a little house proud of our gravel traps, and we do not appreciate someone putting tyre tracks through the middle of it, it just won't look right afterwards.
2. If you do happen to fall off the track and into the above mentioned gravel, do not sit there and spin the back wheels, makes for a lot of dust and more mess for us to clear up. WE WILL NOT PUSH YOU. so don't even think of sitting there, flapping your arms about, it will not happen.
3. If we ask you to get out of the car, GET OUT OF THE CAR!!". It tends to be for a good reason, i.e your car is broken, time to go and apologise to your mechanics for the extra work you have created for them because, for one reason or another, you just didn't see that wall, despite the fact that you had managed to miss it during the previous 10 laps.
Ensuring driver safety also means that, if you have 2 cars come off at the same time, don't let the drivers beat the living daylights out of each other, no matter how tempting that may be.
And please, follow the rules, we will tell on you if you cut corners, barge other cars etc. Just play nicely.
So, we wave flags, tidy up after drivers who dump gravel, oil etc on the track, pick up bits of cars (hopefully just car bits, not the drivers as well), put out fires, tell race control who did what to who, remember car numbers and have a great deal of fun at the same time.
And I'm doing this every other weekend for the next 4-5 months...I love weekends!!
We ended up with a whole weekend of excellent racing from all the racing classes, thankfully no serious accidents, and well done to Ireland for winning the A1GP overall.