I fully understand what you guys are saying but I really don’t know if making riders marshal or supply a marshal is the solution.
My team consists of 5 people. Me, wife, daughter (11 months at Manx), mum and my dad. For my brother this is even worse it’s just him and his partner. If what I was told last year about racers being counted as a qualified marshal I am the only one who would count. Last year I didn’t qualify for the races until the last session. If I had to marshal one session I wouldn’t have qualified to race (know I could go and appeal to the c of c) so personally I would be no better off. I believe this would be a problem for many of the classic riders who like my brother don’t have a team just there partners and having to marshal themselves which could stop them qualifying for the race.

So let’s look at my position long term. Say my mum looks after my daughter so my wife can go marshal. If you said riders had to provide a marshal twice in the fortnight 1 for practice and one for the race. I think it would take 3 years for her to actually count as a marshal. By which time my daughter would be nearly 5 and my parents may not be coming so we would be right back where we started.

The other big problem with this is that I believe you have to want to be a marshal. Neither my wife nor my mum are comfortable with the idea of marshalling as they don’t know how they would cope if something did happen especially if it was someone they knew. Ultimately they are there for everyone’s safety and if they froze or lost the plot because they didn’t really want to be there then I think that would be worse.

I have to admit to not having any great idea’s myself at this point. I thought it might be more productive if ideas were along more then one line.
Perhaps it might be worth organising a meeting at the Manx to try and come up with some ideas. Two heads are better than one.

As a point of interest if you said every rider had to provide 1 marshal for a practice and one for a race it would give you approximately 40 more marshals per practice and 90 per race.

So come on lets get every free person out there marshalling and get the Manx running smoothly.