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Preparing your Formula Dream journey
An FIA report put numbers on it. It takes an average of 838 volunteers to run a Grand Prix, they train 50 to 75 hours a year, and two thirds take annual leave to be there.
Formula 1 is a sport where a single team may spend around $215 million a season and the commercial rights sold for $4.7 billion.
The people standing at the side of the track, the ones who decide whether you can see a hazard before you hit it, are not paid at all.
An FIA report put real numbers on this for the first time. It takes an average of 838 volunteers to run a Grand Prix, a 20,112-strong workforce across a 24-race season, and two thirds of them take annual leave or unpaid holiday
A team simulator is a lidar-scanned virtual test track on a motion platform that responds in milliseconds. Its value depends entirely on one unglamorous thing: correlation.
Track time is rationed to a handful of hours a year, one car at a time. Simulator time is unlimited. That single asymmetry explains how modern F1 teams are built.
From the FIA's own accounting:
That last figure is the one worth sitting with. It is not a measure of what marshals are worth. It is a measure of what the sport does not pay.
"Marshal" covers several distinct jobs, and the roles are more specialised than the orange overalls suggest.
Flag marshals operate the physical flags at posts around the circuit. This is the visible role, and it is the sport's oldest communication system: a signal delivered at the exact point on the track where the hazard is, without anyone needing to describe where it is. What each flag means is covered in F1 flags explained.
Observers watch an assigned section and report to race control. They are the eyes that decide whether a yellow flag becomes a safety car.
Incident officers manage the response when something happens in their sector.
Extrication teams are trained to remove an injured driver from a car without making an injury worse. This is the role that most obviously requires real training and the one nobody thinks about until it matters.
Recovery crews clear debris and move stranded cars, frequently while the session is live and cars are still passing.
The honest answer is history and practicality rather than principle.
Motorsport marshalling grew out of club racing, where volunteering was simply how the sport functioned, and it never converted to a paid model as the money arrived. Marshals are drawn from national motorsport clubs, are licensed and graded by experience, and progress through a system that takes years.
There is also a practical argument. A Grand Prix needs several hundred trained people for three days, twice a year at most venues. Employing that workforce permanently makes little sense, and a professional casual workforce would need the same 50 to 75 hours of annual training with far less continuity. The people who do it have often done it for decades.
None of which changes the fact that a sport generating billions relies on people using their holiday allowance.
Two of our own measurements make the case.
Their signals are the fastest information in the sport. A flag reaches a driver at the point of the hazard, before radio, before graphics. That matters because of how quickly conditions change: a safety car deletes about 71% of the field spread within a lap, and the decision chain that produces it starts with an observer at a post.
They work in the conditions that are most dangerous. Wet running is the clearest case. We measured cars on intermediates as 13.2% slower than on slicks, and the reason sessions get suspended is that drivers cannot see through the spray. Marshals are standing in that, next to a live track, in the same conditions described in what happens when it rains in F1.
The extrication teams exist for the accidents that modern safety has made survivable. When Romain Grosjean's car hit a barrier at 192 km/h and caught fire in 2020, the halo and the survival cell kept him alive, and people ran towards the fire.
It is genuinely open, which surprises people.
The route runs through a national motorsport authority, the FIA-affiliated body in a given country. New marshals typically start at club-level events, complete training modules, and are graded as they accumulate experience. Progression to an F1 event usually requires years at smaller meetings first.
The training is the serious part: 50 to 75 hours a year, covering flag procedure, fire response, extrication and incident management. Volunteers fund their own travel and accommodation in many cases, and, as the FIA's figures show, most spend their own leave doing it.
Almost everything race control does starts with someone at a post.
The Formula Dream app runs a live Dashboard through every session with flag and safety car alerts the moment race control issues them, alongside every car on the circuit map and a timing tower carrying lap times, gaps, intervals, tyre compound and age. You also get live driver radio as it is broadcast, where drivers report conditions marshals are already dealing with, and every FIA document of the weekend as it is published, including the incident reports.
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No. Marshals are volunteers. An FIA report found that two thirds of them take annual leave or unpaid holiday in order to work a Grand Prix, and that replacing them with professional labour would cost at least $15.5 million more per year.
It takes an average of 838 volunteers to run a Grand Prix, the majority of them marshals, which is a workforce of 20,112 across a 24-race season.
The roles include flag marshals, observers reporting to race control, incident officers, extrication teams trained to remove injured drivers, and recovery crews who clear debris and move stranded cars, often while the session is running.
Between 50 and 75 hours of intensive training per person per year. The FIA puts the annual cost of recruiting and training its volunteer workforce at €11.1 million.
Through your national motorsport authority. Most people start at club-level events, complete training modules and are graded by experience, with several years at smaller meetings before working a Formula 1 weekend.
Around 1,200 tonnes of freight, up to seven 747s an event, 300 trucks across Europe and 120 ocean containers in permanent circulation. The hardest job in the sport.