The British Touring Car Championship opened its 2016 campaign a few days ago at the famed Brands Hatch Circuit, the version of which the BTCC uses is a short bullring of a track built into a natural geographical bowl. The effect is that the racing is fast-paced with laps coming in under a minute. As we also mentioned recently, the Brits in the series have no qualms about leaning hard on each other and littering the circuit with body panels. That tends to keep the corner marshals a bit busy, but some of those marshals apparently like to keep everyone on their toes.
During last weekend’s first race, Alex Martin dumped his Ford Focus into the Armco on the short Cooper Straight trying to avoid a spinning car. While Martin managed to limp his wounded Ford back to the pits, some of the bodywork remained in the middle of the straight. One marshal—you may call him brave or stupid or whatever—elected to dash into the middle of the track after the field had passed to collect the bodywork. This being Brands Hatch, however, laps only take about 45 seconds so by the time he reached the debris, he suddenly found himself staring race into the Toyota headlights of backmarker Chris Smiley, who was just ahead of race leader Tom Ingram.
Luckily, that particular part of the circuit was under control of a yellow flag so no one ran over the marshal, who was likely operating under brown flag conditions at the time. With the field bearing down on him, he sweeps the debris off-track with his foot—not quite like David Beckham—and scampers away unscathed just a few feet away from the cars streaming past at what is still a pretty good pace. We’re not sure if he had permission from race control to attempt that glorious move, but we suspect that marshal may have had a post-race meeting.
Catch Twitter user @Mattzel89’s capture of it here:
And here is the close call from the first #BTCC race I mentioned yesterday pic.twitter.com/66VlcwRxiB
— Mattzel89 (@Mattzel89) April 4, 2016
You can also watch all three BTCC races from Brands Hatch here.
