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If you watch the live video again of the pileup (theres a nice cap in the video section), you see the yellow come out after TK had made it through the wreck.. you even hear the live radio transmission from race control saying caution on the racetrack, so it's yet again a complete BS call to say he passed under yellow.

At least karma in this case trumped and he finished with a great result.

We all know it was BS, it's a shame Barnhart is too fucking retarded to realise that.

video of the start incident

and another truck was on the track as well!

Holy Shit!

Briscoe and Franchitti's Twitter said there never seen that before. And they look like disgusted...

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Jesus Christ someone must be fired for that!

That could have ended in a disaster



Mr. Barnhart in the first place!!!

That was just plain stupid and dangerous.

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That's fucking ridiculous. Some luck for that truck to not have gotten there just a few seconds later.

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Bloody hell

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3x TBKL rFactor Hillclimb champion

Two trucks on track, one of them driving the wrong way, against the flow of traffic. Also, if you watch TK and Helios crash, you'll see a marshall standing beyond the barrier who has to duck it to avoid being hit by TK.

Oh so professional all round.

Most of the marshalls are probably local and since this was the first street racing event in Baltimore, you can expect them not to know the code. However you don't get this kind of incompetence in other series when they go to new places (except Marakech, but that was mostly because of having wrong equipment at the wrong place). That's why you have to point your finger at the Indycar race organization as it's them who should educate the track workers properly. So fire Brian Barnhart for putting drivers lives at risk because of his obviously dangerous level of incompetense!

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"Indy doesn't give you a second chance. You have to earn it."

Does this recent series of race control gaffes remind anyone of the infamous Texas incident during the 1997 season? I hear that AJ still hasn't given back the trophy... they had to create a new one for Luyendyk.

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We are witnessing the pussification of America.

Well our own Brendan Kaczmarek was there marshalling. I may not know a huge about marshalling, or which group was being used for Baltimore, but common sense says you don't stand on the wrong side of the barrier.

Indeed, but if you don't make it clear for all the personel that they have to follow all the given instructions and orders, they might do something individually. And once they think they know how to be safe on a race track, they get false safe feeling for what ever they are doing. It's not that you give them similar jackets and two or three different set of flags and walki-talkies that makes them marshalls, you have to get them completely understand what are the rules there for.

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"Indy doesn't give you a second chance. You have to earn it."

Barnheart is turning into the cliche of the old man who doesn't realise he's getting on a bit and making stupid decisions and keeps making more stupid decisions to try and assert his authority....

Indycar needs to be strong and get rid before he does more permanent damage.

Still Indycar themselves not saying much about it and I doubt much will happen.

Speed did an article with Rahal's point of vue on it. Absolutely appalling.


http://auto-racing.speedtv.com/article/ ... -baltimore

Driver has been suspended

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Attendance on race day was 70,000. Indianapolis aside, only two other races gathered so much crowd on race day, Long Beach and Texas (Barber had ca. 50,000 as the next best).

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A bit late on answering this, but...

SCCA Marshals are used in the US almost exclusively. We are volunteers, but damn good ones at that. You'd normally be right about not standing on the hot side of the barrier, Dave, but...

Marshalling on street circuits is a little different. Because of the enormous amounts of catch fencing put up absolutely everywhere, the sight lines are appalling... If you're looking up track to blue flag, you really can't see much of anything at all based on the number of vertical supports and the angle you're having to look at. They'll have holes in the fence you can flag through about a meter or a meter and a half long, but it's really not enough for a good sight line, particularly on long straights.

A lot of sharp corners will have gaps in the end of them for the entry and exit of safety vehicles. As the marshals posts have to be selected in accordance with the track layout, it usually makes sense to combine the two areas. It's a win-win, really... You have plenty of space for the marshals and the safety vehicles, the end of the wall makes for a great sightline up the straight, and you keep the yellow flagger out of the way by putting him against the back wall at the gap until he's needed. I've flagged from a position exactly like that before, Turn 8 at St. Petersburg. The wall continues straight past on drivers' left and then there's a gap before it rejoins the extended wall line in the runoff. I've never, ever felt unsafe doing it. A fellow flagger and I were attacked by Takuma Sato in a session there, as a matter of fact, when his wheel came off in qualifying. The blue flagger dashed out of the way and I followed suit.

Flaggers do not have slow reactions. If they do, they will almost always voluntarily opt out of placing themselves in a precarious position for obvious reasons. Flaggers around them will often preempt their movements by watching their eyes. If their eyebrows go up and they start to jolt, the other flagger is immediately in motion. It's nonverbal communication and it works extremely well.

Of course, every now and then you get a freak accident. It would not be unreasonable to eliminate the gap in the wall as an expected impact zone and to consider it safe for the purposes of marshaling and entry/exit for safety vehicles. It's not in a trajectory line for normal racing and provides excellent sightlines for both corner entry and corner exit. It really could not have been placed in a better spot. With that said, Kanaan's incident was not a normal trajectory. He swerved into Castroneves, and, not realizing the marshals' post was there, set himself up to go straight into where the post was. Not good.

If you say "move the post," you run into a few problems. First, the front straight is extremely long. Putting a hole in the fence makes it impossible to see down the length of the straight on account of the vertical supports. Second, you need to have it in a place where the blue flagger can see the whole straight and the yellow flagger can see the corner entry, apex, and exit.

Individual flaggers are human, however, and things happen. You'd find yourself creeping too for better vision if it were available. It's not ideal to be on the hot side of the wall but over the course of a half hour or and hour, everyone will edge towards the hot side just a little bit. This was just a case of bad timing and a freak accident.

We all, through either formal or informal training - or *gasp* experience - understand the concept of racing and of trajectories and how accidents work. I've seen more than a few nasty ones in my time, and when you show up to a corner the very first thing you do is to plan your escape route. Understand the potential dangers and know your way out in case of a problem. Safety first is not just a lame slogan, it means a whole hell of a lot when things happen in split-seconds and lives are on the line.

The reality is that racing is dangerous. We are not professionals in the definition of the word, but we are extremely well trained and a typical corner station for a professional event will have somewhere in the area of 100-150 years of experience depending on the event and the number of marshals. We do not take our job lightly and insinuations otherwise are absurd. We understand there are people at the top with more power than us, but we consider ourselves to be a professional, safe, and extremely efficient and effective organization, without whom races would not happen. That's a lot of responsibility, knowing drivers lives are on the line.



Niko, I might be a bit outspoken about things like this but I'd suggest it's the other way around about 90% of the time. Most professional stewards are not, have not been, and never will be marshals. They've never been out on a corner, in harms way, being attacked by cars or by debris and don't understand the dynamic of the corner post itself. Often times each series will send a steward down to the flag meetings to give some instructions and to take in how we get on with our work. Ironically, I've never seen an actual steward, clerk of the course, or race director for either Grand-Am or for Indycar (which doesn't reflect well on Indycar given their general lack of a safety culture). Anyway...

You're absolutely right that it's not the flags, the radios, or the flashy orange or white pants that make people marshals. It's an attitude. It's an attitude that demands safety for spectators, fellow marshals, drivers, and safety personnel. It demands near perfection and ultimate focus. We all understand that we are not the top of the food chain, but we also understand that every single move we make and every single radio communication can affect the outcome of the race. And, in the back of our minds, we know we are the only ones that really understand our job.

We take the words from the series seriously (it is their race, after all) but at some point their restrictions will actually become more of a safety hazard than we could ever place ourselves in. Indycar has done this more than once, I should say, in various forms, and I've grown pretty tired of working their races... I've got every intention of sending them a letter regarding how I feel, but we'll see how that goes.

Finally, regarding getting us to "understand what the rules are there for."

We understand safety. We understand the rules. We understand how racing works. We understand crashes. We understand impact zones. We understand protecting ourselves and our fellow marshals. What the problem usually boils down to is series not understanding flagging, and that can definitely be a major problem.

I don't mean to come across as harsh or as condescending, but I am pretty passionate about this subject. I've seen safety workers employed by series do far more unsafe things than I've ever seen marshals do, but of course they're professionals and we're not...