Unmarshaled Events

This is a work-in-progress draft for the league's policy on conducting unmarshaled events.  An unmarshaled event is one in which there is no officially-designated marshal present during the event (either at all or intermittently).

Designating an Unofficial Marshal

1. If no official marshal is present, there is the option to designate someone in attendance as an unofficial marshal.  That person can be anyone who feels sufficiently familiar with league rules and policies to be able to fulfill marshal responsibilities with confidence, consistency and accuracy.
2. If someone volunteers or accepts a nomination as an unofficial marshal, then the drivers in attendance must be in agreement to acknowledge that person as marshal for the event.
3. If consensus acknowledgement is reached, then no subsequent objection regarding that person's rulings as marshal can be levied.  NOTE: This means that the marshal is the marshal, period, once that designation has been made.  Drivers are expected to treat the acting marshal with the same respect and authority as they would any regular official marshal.
4. The person accepting the marshal role must NOT participate as a driver, preferably at any point during the event.  This will help avoid the existence or appearance of any impropriety in the person's rulings as marshal.
5. If the person acting as marshal should wish to abdicate the role, they may do so at any time, but are encouraged not to do so during a race session if possible in order for there to be a consistent environment for the full duration of the race.
6. To summarize: someone should not accept the marshal role lightly, nor should the drivers agree to acknowledge a marshal lightly.  An event will be better managed as either completely unmarshaled or completely marshaled, but flip-flopping back and forth, with potentially different people in the role, introduces too much risk of confusion, inconsistency and contention.

Voting & Event Session Management

1. With no marshal (or admin) present, drivers are responsible as a group for appropriately sequencing through the sessions of the event.  That consists of just using the in-game voting system for cycling to the next event when a consensus has been reached that it is time to do so.
2. Some sessions, such as qual and the scheduled break, are configured to be a specific time and generally should not be terminated early.  For such sessions, no action is required from the drivers to transition to the next session and the timed session should simply be allowed to expire normally.  Such sessions can be restarted if there is agreement.
   • In the case of qual, if it is restarted then it should probably be conducted in full again.  However, if there is agreement among the drivers, an abbreviated qual can be conducted and its results will be used in favor of the previous qual (both by rFactor and by the league's results system).
   • In the case of a warmup/break, it can be restarted for the purpose of extending it to accommodate an absent driver or some other extenuating circumstance.  If restarted, it needn't be allowed to run its full length and can be terminated by vote whenever there is agreement among the drivers.
3. The voting threshold is typically set low enough to prevent a successful vote from being difficult or inconvenient to achieve.  But that also means that it is easy to vote through a session in spite of there being one or more drivers who are opposed, or perhaps just temporarily 'afk' or in the process of rebooting/rejoining/etc..  So care should be taken on the part of the drivers to pay attention to the circumstances and not to carelessly call for a vote, or to submit a vote value (yes/no) without accounting for the situation at hand.
4. In the event of a race restart, be careful not to accidentally vote for 'Restart Weekend'.

Behavior 

1. Be extra courteous to each other.  Contentious incidents are poison in an unmarshaled race, when there is no one available to provide an unstressed objective real-time review.  The best way to avoid contentious incidents is to avoid incidents.
2. Use good judgement and common sense and try to stay objective.  Don't be selfish.  Don't be unnecessarily aggressive in your driving (or communication, for that matter).
3. If someone sees a train wreck that they think merits a full field yellow, call it confidently and everyone should give that judgement the benefit of the doubt and don't turn it into a argument about second-guessing what happened.  Just get the race back on track (literally and figuratively).
4. If something happens about which there is a difference of opinion, don't hash it out while driving.  Just table the issue until after the race and preferably after the event or you risk wasting a bunch of time arguing about it and compromise the time available for the event.  Someone be the bigger man and just give the position back, or give yourself a stop-n-go, or agree to disagree and just get on with your race.  Even if you were genuinely victimized in the most epic way, you'll survive and the sun will come up tomorrow.