Yes, that’s right. On a bright March day, full of steak and ale pie, I signed up to learn the noble art of marshalling.

The noble art of marshalling. Not pictured: fire.

If you don’t know what a race marshal does, think back to any Formula 1 or MotoGP race you may have seen. When the inevitable fireball appeared, little figures in bright orange ran straight into it to drag out the driver and put out the fire. Yup. Those are race marshals.

On a rainy day in February, I wrote an email to the Motor Sports Association, saying I’d quite like to get involved in marshalling. Fast forward a few days, and Bob from the MSA emailed me to invite me to a training day a couple of weeks later. Someone from a local club, he said, Will Be In Touch. I was instantly filled with bone-crushing terror.

Oh, God. I was going to be contacted by an Eddie or a Chas or a Kev, and they were going to ask whether I wanted to hand out brochures or something.

Instead, I received a very nice email from Mildred, giving me the details of the training day, and asking if I would be needing lunch, and would I make sure to email Anne my contact details. In my head, I was suddenly headed to a wayward chapter of the WI, complete with jam sandwiches.

Marshalling: like the WI, but with extra explosions.

The actual training day was bloody terrifying, and more than a little bewildering. I mean, MARSHALLING, seriously. It’s like those strange people that take up a new hobby and devote an entire room in the house to it. You know it’s not gonna end well. The pre-reading was also not encouraging: marshalling introduction, incident response theory, fire theory, fire practical, flags theory… Hey, did anyone spot the fire practical in there? Me too.

Before that, though, there was mostly a whole lot of PowerPoint (mostly of explosions), lists of kit (mostly of the flame-retardant variety), and Golden Rules (when there is carbon fibre flying at your head, duck or be decapitated). About halfway through the day, having been fed a proper meal of pie and chips, I found myself bent double and touching my toes while a large man peered critically at my bum. “Well?” I asked him anxiously.

He hissed and tipped his head to the right. “No,” he said finally. “You definitely want the other one.”

In the manner of personal shoppers everywhere, he was helping me pick my perfect outfit: a hi-vis, flame-retardant overall. They come in one colour (bright orange) and two styles (cheap-without-pockets and expensive-with-pockets). The main thing to get right is the size. Too big is not good, because you can catch it on stray bits of car, ripping the fabric. Too small is disastrous, as it impedes movement when staying nimble is important for maintaining a normal life expectancy. You wear the overalls over at least one, and possibly up to four, layers of clothing. You work in them, eat in them, and occasionally fall asleep on the way home in them.

Very occasionally, you will have to evade flying bits of car in them.

My outfit properly selected, I tied up my hair, kitted up in fireproof hi-vis, donned my giant welder’s gauntlets, and joined my fellow trainees in the woods around Brands Hatch, where a car had been set alight for our benefit.

Can I just say, THIS. THIS IS HOW FIRE TRAINING IS SUPPOSED TO BE DONE. No longer will I accept ridiculous PowerPoint presentations of the correct way to remove the safety thingie from a fire extinguisher. Set something on fire and shove me at it to get some damn practice in! It was ruddy marvellous.

So, marshalling: surprisingly awesome. And it turned out that I wasn’t the only woman there, which was a major relief. Of the sixty or so new trainees present, just over a tenth were women. (Interesting demographic titbit: while the men spanned all socioeconomic ranges and ages from 14 to 64, the women were primarily professionals in their late twenties and early thirties.) The practical teams were pretty mixed, and our own team was 50/50 male/female. So it was an odd thing that, when the day wound down and we all gathered around several big tables to be fed some caffeine before the drive home, all the women trainees had somehow congregated around one table. Without even asking or discussing, we had all got out our phones and exchanged contact details. Afterwards, my personal shopper came up to me.

“Is everything okay?” he asked anxiously. “Only, I noticed that you all went…away.” He gestured vaguely at the Women Only table.

Truthfully, I hadn’t even noticed until he’d pointed it out. The funny thing was, everything was okay. The day had been brilliant, full of new things to do, plus bonus cars-on-fire, and I hadn’t felt awkward or out of place even once. But, in the end, the ratio had won out, and we’d all gravitated towards each other.

The orange jumpsuit of marshalling glory: stylish AND flame-retardant. Matching umbrella optional.

Since then, personal shopper and I have become pretty good friends. We’ve been to several race meets together, and coordinate travelling to the track. There have been many adventures, and when I stop being on fire and/or decapitated I shall finish writing them all up. But somehow, strangely, I still recognise those women I met for just a few hours those months ago. Partly it’s because we shared a profound experience of alienation in a testosterone-driven, male-dominated field, despite everyone’s best intentions.

But mostly it’s because we all have to get changed into our kit in the ladies’ loos at the main paddock, and there’s only three bloody cubicles in there.

So, this happened.

In case you’ve been on the other side of the moon these past few months, the media’s much-touted Arab Spring had an interesting tangent via a discussion in the Saudi Council on whether women in Saudi Arabia should be allowed the vote. They eventually decided that yes, they probably should… eventually. We wouldn’t want to rush these things. They won’t be able to contest the elections, of course, but least – if King Abdullah considers the recommendations – they may be able to cast a vote in the municipal elections.

Except that this small pittance of representation didn’t seem to be satisfactory for women in Saudi Arabia. So… well, see for yourselves. Here is Manal al-Sharif driving in Saudi Arabia, and discussing what it means for her to do so.

She was arrested and imprisoned for 10 days for daring to drive.

She’s not the only one. There’s an entire site of these vids (in fact, more than one): women driving in Saudi Arabia, in protest at… well, mostly not being allowed to drive. Here’s a twitter feed of them doing it in style. In fact, June 17 saw 30 or 40 women behind the wheel, following weeks of an online campaign that saw women taping or photographing themselves driving. (If you’re wondering whether 30-40 people is a lot, consider what happened the last time women tested this ban. Think about what ‘punishment’ means in Saudi Arabia. Then try to imagine being one of those women out there on 17 June.)

There is, of course, a danger to conflating correlation and causality. Yes, women protesting by driving happened to take place at about the same time that women’s voting rights were being revived for discussion in Saudi Arabia. It could have been a massive coincidence, and 30-40 women, however courageous, hardly make up a political movement all by themselves. And anyway, what does driving have to do with political representation?

The Times‘s Janice Turner is pretty clear where she stands in a now-paywalled article titled The Freedom of the Road is a Feminist Issue. Consider being a woman in Saudi Arabia. Ignore all the discussions about political representation for the moment, and focus instead on the daily grind. You get up, you get dressed, you have to go to work or to the market or whatever. Luckily, your husband has hired you a car with your very own (male) driver… and should he feel perfectly comfortable in sexually assaulting you, there is nothing you can do about it.

Or how about you forgo the potential dubious safety of a hired car and opt for a taxi. Prepare to walk the streets trying to hail one: streets where your mere presence outdoors may be cast as a sexual provocation. Inevitably, in trying to lock women away ‘for their own protection’, lest they be seen by vociferous male eyes, the Wahhabi religious laws have created a space so deeply hostile and threatening to women that their mere presence is transgressive. It is little wonder, then, that Manal al-Sharif talks about how safe she feels in her car, with her doors locked.

A person’s first car has always symbolised their freedom: be it at 17, with their newly-minted license and the entirety of the countryside filled with welcoming ditches to drive it into, or at 50, with a newly-issued divorce and a hesitant rediscovery of independent living. A woman who has a car gets to choose the place she is occupying. If she wants to leave, she is not dependent on anyone else. What could be more terrifying to the Saudi religious leaders? Never mind that neither the Koran nor the law bans women from driving; they were so terrified at the freedom driving would afford women that they went ahead and issued a fatwa just to be safe.

New Saudi Arabia's traffic sign (women2drive). (Image = public domain via wiki. Created by Carlos Latuff)

So what actually happened on June 17th, when these 30-40 women took to the road? Did governments fall or cities rock? Reports differ. For one thing, no one can agree on the number. Even the Guardian seems confused, using the 30-40 figure in one article, and “at least 45” in another. The government of Saudi Arabia is in flat-out denial, refusing to acknowledge that the protest happened at all (despite a traffic ticket being issued).

Two weeks on, five of the drivers were arrested, despite early comments from the government that they would allow their families to ‘deal with them‘. Despite this, campaigners are not deterred, continuing to maintain a significant social media presence. And even before the protest took place the Shoura declare that they were ready to discuss women driving “if requested“. I’m thinking that women risking arrest in order to parallel park in Riyadh would qualify as such.

Meanwhile, Manal al-Sharif hasn’t given up. Since her release from custody, the former prisoner of conscience has been spearheading a movement to teach more and more women how to drive. With the moderate King Abdullah on the throne, and the authorities apparently turning a blind eye to the recent on-road excursions by three women during Eid, it looks like the driving ban may not be in place for much longer.