Two weeks ago, Round 5 of the World Endurance Championship brought me to Circuit of the Americas for the first time. Lone Star Le Mans was my first endurance race as a flag marshal, three days of support series season finales culminating in a six-hour hypercar showstopper.
That was the plan, anyway.
Rain had loomed large in the distance all weekend and started to fall on track less than an hour before the green flag. Turn 1 remained mostly dry, but Turn 12 collected puddles; this stark difference was enough for the FIA to declare this a wet race. Extra opening laps behind the safety car made for a drawn out, anticlimactic start to a contest that ultimately disappeared in a flash.
This last race marked a large shift in my mental state, both on and off-track.
Part of this was due to the makeup of my post: this was the second instance this year in which I had a teammate for whom this race was their first ever as a marshal. WEC in the United States is interesting in the sense that, while being a series of consequence, it often serves as a stepping stone for newer marshals—as well as those whose goal is to work F1 races—to gain experience. Regional races do this too (and are arguably better in this respect because of their regularity and relative accessibility) but professional events, especially another FIA-sanctioned series, are necessary to build credibility in high-stakes situations. Even with my light résumé, I was as much of a teacher to this person as our turn captain and primary radio communicator. More of one, sometimes—during the main event, all FCYs and Safety Cars happened while I was the senior-most marshal in our rotation and had the main headset on, so any decisions to act or wait were mine to call.
(I think I did fine. Definitely need to work more races before I feel comfortable enough to voluntarily shoulder a CPM's responsibility all weekend.)
Most of the change, though, stems from an evolving relationship with danger and time.
As of writing, I have worked eight races as a flag marshal, six professional, with at least two more scheduled for the rest of 2026. My first track session was in March of last year, a regional event at Buttonwillow Raceway Park. Less than two months later, my next race was the F1 Miami Grand Prix. I became a motorsport fan in March 2024.
I should also mention: I'm terrified of driving. I have never so much as sat in the pilot seat of a passenger vehicle.
When I tell people these things in tandem, the most common reaction is disbelief. Really? How does that make sense? I have no accident history or definitive reason to be weary beyond the default—cars are multi-ton metal machines that go fast and can only protect its innards from so much. In fact, barring the times I've traveled with people who flirted with 100MPH on California freeways or braced against winding roads and significant elevation changes, I typically relax in my seat to the point of sleep. Never feeling 100% safe, mind you, but sufficiently mollified.
Even in that state of placidity, my brain is rarely quiet. This is not unique to me, but it bears stating plainly. I have a strong, unceasing internal voice—sometimes several at once, like a cursed chorus—and my dreams are startlingly multi-sensory, one step below lucid. It is immensely difficult for me to get me to shut up.
This has remained true through most race weekends thus far. I grew up a garden-variety high-strung honors student, perfectionistic and perpetually scared of failure or, worse, disappointment. That initial Buttonwillow weekend saw me intensely study an SCCA flag chart on the way to the circuit, only for me to make the classic rookie mistake of throwing a yellow for an incident in a neighboring turn on my second day, causing my turn captain, a stern older man named Chip, to scold me to the point of tears. All the studying in the world meant nothing when I worried too much about following the letter of the law instead of paying attention to what was in front of me.
Prior to WEC, I cried at least once at almost all races because of a self-perceived misstep, be it hyper-awareness of my weakness with timing blue flag calls (LVGP 2025) or reflexively resorting to militant solemnity when on post with highly experienced teammates (Miami this year). Minus what happened with Chip, which I quickly realized then was the result of a firmer teaching style than I had with my post chief the day before, every time I've cried trackside was a result of me beating myself up for thinking too hard, then thinking too hard about said self-flagellation, thus beating myself up about it more, dog chasing tail ad infinitum until it dies, or cars are back on course.
I developed my aforementioned fear of driving at some point in the last ten years. I wish I knew what triggered it. It hasn't been a lifelong problem, because I willingly signed up for driver's ed class as a high school sophomore, thinking I would check off that quintessentially teenage American dream of getting my license and going wherever I wanted. This, of course, did not happen.
In the years since, I have had countless well-meaning people offer to teach me how to drive, family and friends and fellow marshals. Exposure therapy, defensive driving, and signing up for a track session on a road course are all suggestions I have heard and tried to seriously internalize—and I do mean seriously. Included free with my neuroses is a comprehensive logic checker. Someone can explain how I may be able to overcome my fear, I absorb what they are saying, I consider all the ins and outs of every solution and its loopholes until there is no unturned stone, I see no reason why this strategy cannot work, I feel hope. And then I visualize myself driving and am petrified again.
One of my worst thought spirals is born from constant doom: any second now, an emergency is about to happen. This spiral generally overrides the internal voice(s). It doesn't matter that all my doors and windows are locked, the weather is clear and calm, I am conscious and healthy. A siren is about to go off, something is about to break, someone I love (including myself) is about to die, and there's nothing I can do about it except dwell on the impending inevitability.
No siren. I am still alive.
But what about now.
Right now?
Now?
In race form, this emergency would almost always be a crash, although now that I've worked NASCAR, there's the increased possibility of fire and explosions. My head fills with imagined disaster scenes, which leads to physical tension: spiked heartbeats, clenched fists around wooden flag handles, furrowed eyebrows, choked throat, aborted movements. This precognition isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially if working comms—something Race Control and flag chiefs will encourage is rehearsing an alert call, so when one comes up, you will be more equipped to deliver it calmly, clearly, concisely, correctly, and completely. Alert, alert! Turn 1A. Hard impact. Car [## color] into wall, driver's right...
I haven't yet had to take point on a priority call, though I have played backup. Still, I mentally run through my lines so much that I sometimes have to pinch my lips together and flex my hands to make sure they're not hovering over any radio buttons, in case I might have accidentally made a call without realizing.
WEC was the first time I wasn't constantly doing this.
"Ever try to concentrate on doing something difficult with a crowd of people watching?…worse, with a crowd of spectators maybe all vocally hoping you fail, so that their favorite will beat you?" So asked David Foster Wallace in his 1994 essay "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart", about the prodigious tennis player Tracy Austin and his disappointment in her autobiography.
As part of his analysis, Wallace considered the disconnect between the greatness an elite athlete can achieve in their performance and their inability to articulate what they did and how it felt, either in speech or writing. Time and again, reporters interview athletes following a sporting event and come away with banal responses, which one might think would be so trite as to be worthless… "if there weren't a large and serious audience out here who find the banalities right and good. As if the emptiness in these athletes' descriptions of their feelings confirmed something we need to believe." Wallace believed, however, there remained something beyond the platitudes and mass-market appeal of a sports star's story as told by them (to whatever extent) that continually compels fans to keep buying their memoirs, deeper than sheer awe or desire for intimacy with athletic profundity.
Austin could not be empty-headed, he reckoned, for it took such extraordinary mental ability to play the kind of world-class tennis she did. Wallace used himself as a counterpoint, having been around the same age playing competitive tennis in the same lower ranks as Austin. "In my own comparatively low-level junior matches, before audiences that rarely hit three digits…I would drive myself crazy…I'd get divided, paralyzed. As most ungreat athletes do. Freeze up, choke. Lose our focus. Become self-conscious. Cease to be wholly present in our wills and choices and movements."
Under the kind of pressure and distraction "that would break a mind prone to self-conscious fear in two", repetition, pattern, instinct, and memory are what separate the ordinary athletes from the greats. These are abstractions requiring deep thought but not necessarily language; thinking in language instead of action may prevent the Great Athlete's ability to act.
"The real secret behind top athletes' genius, then," Wallace concluded, "may be as esoteric and obvious and dull and profound as silence itself. The real, many veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player's mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all."
An athlete's memoir, as well as their post-game interviews, are wrought with cliché because they mean it, ideas presented "not as trite but simply as true, or perhaps…as simple imperatives that are either useful or not and, if useful, to be invoked and obeyed and that's all there is to it." Austin's history and career are fascinating, regardless of whether she (and a ghostwriter) can detail them in effective writing. "The only certainty seems to be that such a person does not produce a very good prose memoir... It may well be that we spectators, who are not divinely gifted as athletes, are the only ones able truly to see, articulate, and animate the experience of the gift we are denied. And that those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it—and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence."
It is what it is.
In one of my thesis essays, "HAZARDS", I try to wrap my head around the idea that most road drivers aren't constantly panicking or doubting themselves.
I've asked many drivers in my life whether they actively feel the weight of their responsibility to deliver themselves and other people safely, and if not, why and how they stop thinking about how the failure to perform this duty can be fatal. Whether they've ever thought about it like that at all. I'd always have to do a good job so the people I love can live. Meanwhile, others on the road don't care, or if they do, they show it in truly awful ways.
Neither I nor the average road driver qualifies as the genius athlete Wallace outlined, but the idea of the performer performing without necessarily thinking about it, juxtaposed with the spectator who is able to think and talk about the performance during and afterward, really resonates with me. For most drivers, it isn't about death or duty, but simply getting from one place to another. Drivers have practiced this skill, repeated it and developed enough patterns, instincts, and memories to the point of being able to just drive.
I get it in the same way I understand the solutions people have given me for overcoming my fear. It makes sense in my head, but I can't translate that to tangible action. Yes, I could "just drive", but I doubt I could do so without losing myself to the thought spiral. And don't tell me it gets easier, because to me that sounds like forgetting. Out of sight, out of mind, out of body, I am gone, we are dead.
Why, then, have I been able to get on post as a marshal—most frequently on street circuits that merely offer a chain-link fence, concrete, and/or Tecpro barriers between me and the racecars—and go from throwing unnecessary flags out of fright to being so serene I almost fall asleep?
This is when I turn to time.
In 2011, Irena Martínková and Jim Parry published "Two ways of conceiving time in sports" in Acta Gymnica 41. The authors sought to explain two different concepts of time in sport and their roles, then classified sports into four groups depending on the role of time in them. They did so by comparing time in the "Western sports conception" (chiefly Europe and the United States)—understood to be "linear, homogenous, infinite, objective, divisible, quantifiable and measureable" along an axis of past, present, and future—and philosopher Martin Heidegger's theory of original temporality.
"According to Heidegger: 'Temporality temporalizes itself as a future which makes the present in the process of having-been' (Heidegger, 1967, p. 350)." The authors explain original temporality for humans, or Dasein ("being there") as a unity of three "ecstases"—having been, Dasein's projection into the future, and the combination of these which yields the present—that are not static but are fundamentally mortal. However, Dasein often does not understand its own being in relation to finitude or its difference from other things in the world; "for one thing, that Dasein is 'being in the world' (In-der-Welt-sein), i.e. that the world is opened and understood only through Dasein's own temporalizing, and that Dasein is defined by the fact that, in its Being, this very Being is an issue."
The notion of Western objective time affects original temporality as much as it stands apart. Thus, Martínková and Parry's four categories of sport in relation to time are time-constituted, event-constituted, mixed (involving both time- and event-constituted elements), and sports encouraging the experiencing of original temporality.
Motorsport does not fit into a single category. Many racing series are event sports with the possibility of time measurement, determined by the completion of a specified number of tasks (start, finish, do not drive out of bounds more than a certain number of times, etc.), but Formula 1 is inherently time constituted. Per FIA sporting regulations, an F1 race is limited to a maximum of 2 hours from the starting signal or 3 hours if suspended. Most races finish in less time, of course, but the specter of an end-of-session signal remains omnipresent.
Endurance racing, however, may be better understood with original temporality.
When it comes to original temporality in sports, the authors consider "high risk sports", those that offer participants the potential to "realize the finitude of their life" because of their "unhomelikeness" and danger. By opening the door to encounters with the unexpected and frightening, human beings can experience wholeness and authenticity, as defined by Heidegger (Dasein prioritizing the future and understanding human mortality).
WEC races are also time-constituted: once six hours have elapsed at COTA, for example, cars may only complete their current lap and cross the finish line. Multiple classes racing simultaneously means there will be a vast difference in overall lap totals, but the winner is ultimately determined by making it to the end of the 6 (or 8 or 10 or 24) hours with as many finished laps as possible. Completion of this pursuit will come by avoiding accidents, managing strategy, racing hard, utilizing skill, and/or befriending luck. The thrill comes in figuring out what cards you will be dealt from green flag to checkered and how you will play them.
"However," the authors noted, "the possibility of experiencing original temporality in high risk sport is not so straightforward." Beginners are most likely to be cognizant of being in an "unhomelike" situation. "Experienced and advanced athletes have usually become so habituated through practice to doing these sports, to dealing with uncomfortable situations, that they do not perceive them as being quite so risky any more (Breivik, 2010)… the long time practitioners who have become accustomed to the ways and common practices of high risk sport may even come to feel superhuman – invulnerable and unbreakable – and in this way miss the possibility of experiencing themselves as being more fully human."
Marshaling has been an excellent magnifying glass for examining what the hell is wrong with me. I don't mean this self-deprecatingly. Being a marshal has really been about signaling to myself what to do.
This was my first endurance race. I have flagged less than ten events, professional or amateur, though this will stop being true by the end of the year. The motorsport world, particularly the race official side, remains new to me. I'm not sure when this will stop being the case, but for as long as it is true, I will continue being the beginner, constantly aware of where I will go in relation to where I've been and, thus, being in the moment I find myself in now, writing this between my first time at COTA and my next, in mid-October for F1.
Trust that I will probably remain deeply aware of my finitude. I maintain that this is a good thing to hold onto as a marshal, considering our job is to relay information regarding track safety and act to protect lives. Head on a swivel.
In time, though, I will become an experienced worker. I will have called a major incident and overseen a flag post and be able to laugh about the times I've messed up, knowing that I have learned and can be a good, consistent example for the next wave of beginners.
This is already happening. This is why I am fixating on my newfound understanding of the marshal flow state, something nowhere near as transcendent as Tracy Austin's tennis but personally as profound. To find something outside myself that quiets the noise and gets me, at least for a time, to simply be here now is a game changer.
I'm grateful for my typical role as spectator to excellence and for the language it has afforded me, but I won't pretend like I don't aspire to make work so great it speaks for itself. Already I've come a long way. I hope to keep going, one race at a time.