Auto Club marshals forces for safety at Yas Marina Circuit

Marshals deal with the wreckage from Michael Schumacher’s crash with Vitatonio Liuzzi last year.

'Observe, report and act' - that is the motto of the men and women trained by the Automobile & Touring Club of the UAE to serve as grand prix marshals. From rescuing stranded drivers to literally putting out fires, Chuck Culpepper reports, they are well prepared to keep the race safe.

On a Friday morning in October amid the vast ghost town of a racing circuit at rest, one building in Yas Marina bustled.

It filled with people by 9am and rang all day with the sound of important work, with the Automobile & Touring Club of the United Arab Emirates (ATC) concluding months of training sessions for marshals for the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

This weekend, 700 marshals will man - and woman (the ratio generally four to one) - everything from pit lanes to flag posts. No one will notice them really, said Natalia Sosa Medina, the communications manager, "unless something goes really wrong".

The workload of preparation astounds, especially in the melting-pot UAE where Tanya Kutsenko, the club's project manager, has counted 63 nationalities and close to 20 languages among the marshals. Seven hundred volunteers, she said, "are like a tail that will hit you, so if the whole thing has to be adjusted … communication becomes the key issue to keeping it efficient."

Yet in the maelstrom that caused the ATC to forecast five years before ceasing to borrow some marshals from other countries, the programme has reached self-sufficiency in three.

Ronan Morgan, the ATC sporting director, ran an early meeting and then the groups dispersed for another round of training.

Volunteers learnt firefighting in searing heat, huddled beneath a tent near another tent reserved for extinguishers.

Nearby, on a motorcycle, sat Scott Shankland, a three-time Desert Challenge participant who is part of the "boundary team" charged with race-day tasks such ferrying peeved drivers. His tour of the track found the Briton Andrew Childs teaching protocol for stalled cars at the pit lane exit.

"It's absolutely life-and-death," said Childs, a motorsports enthusiast for 36 of his 53 years. "It's observe, report and act. ... We're just safety; that's what it boils down to."

On marshal training: "We're building a team spirit that isn't there at the beginning. The marshals don't just grow on trees and pop out. You actually have to form them."

Some volunteer for a social outlet, some from fandom, and many Emiratis volunteer out of patriotism. Some rate all three, as do Saeed Al Marzouqi, 35, and Waleed Al Yafaie, 22, who said at lunch: "As volunteers, we want to serve our country."

Some have heredity, as with Childs' 23-year-old son, Tom, of the Recovery Team, driving the truck that hauls troubled cars and who last year had to tow Sebastian Vettel's after two tyre punctures. "Quite cool to have the fastest guy in the world, his car needed to be rescued by me," Tom Childs said.

He marvelled: "When the light goes green, the roar and the buzz that you get, the adrenalin that kicks in is phenomenal, you can't really explain it. You don't just hear the sound of that, you feel it as well."

They feel also what the Bangladeshi volunteer Mohammed Essa noted. An F1 fan since childhood, Essa spent the last grand prix manning the flags from Post 1 but felt no nerves after six training instalments. He just felt, he said, "like I was part of Formula One".

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