Wednesday morning and we’re breakfast and bus to the track for our first day of training and familiarisation. The approach to Yas Marina is on a purpose built highway and as we pull up the gate it’s hard not to be impressed by the scale of the place. Most notable is the enormous hotel that straddles the track, its walls covered in thousands of LEDs; a birds eye view of the place unfortunately makes one realise that it’s shaped like a massive winky, but never mind. Only those in helicopters will ever see that.

Decanting from the bus, Christina gives us a rapid tour of the clinic. Where the camp is basic, the clinic is salubrious and overflowing with equipment and facilities. For an on-site med centre it entirely exceeds my expectations. Inside a covered drive-through ambulance bay a corridor splits left and right. To the left we find a resus bay with three beds, then onwards into the medical directors office and through into another treatment room with another three beds including paeds and infant resus capacity. There’s a wet room with a purpose built burns stretcher. There’s X-ray and ultrasound. Outside is an HLS with space for two aircraft. Front of house holds a pleasant reception centre run by two uniformed security guards who smile and nod like dogs on a parcel shelf as we troop in - “Morning ma’am…sir…sir…ma’am…sir…ma’am…”

The FIA are all over this event, understandably. This is the first time an F1 event has been operated in the UAE and they want to make sure it goes well. As such, our first day on site is fraught and drips with an air of “hurry up and wait”. Every member of staff needs an ID and bib, but we are also issued with teeshirts, caps and overalls and those of us working on the track have already sent our measurements into the organisers some weeks beforehand to ensure our flameproof overalls, track boots and gloves are available in the right size.

As such, I haven’t bothered bringing any boots with me, bringing instead a comfy, knackered pair of Airwalk sneakers (complete with frankly immature laces decorated with silver stars, fuck you, I am *too*a grown up) which were delightful to wear in the plane and while bumming around, but now that I’m standing in the clinic surrounded by proper grownups I’m sort of wishing I’d brought some proper boots or shoes. No matter, I’ll wait until uniform issue and then everything will be dandy. I idly wonder to myself whether our boots will be black leather jobs, or lightweight desert boots such as we wear on the Desert Challenge.

Uhhh.

No.

See, the reason track staff are being issued with boots and gloves is because of the much hyped KERS system (Kinetic Energy ReallyClever Superfast…maybe) which effectively stores up the energy that the car would otherwise waste when braking and pours it into a massive capacitor, which the driver can later tap into for a boost of extra speed. Personally, I thought electricity and vehicles only really worked well with milk floats, but hey, what do I know?

The point is, however, that should these cars crash, there’s a theoretical risk that the KERS will discharge into the body of the car. The carbon fibre body of the car. Making the entire car live. I don’t do physics, I don’t understand electricity, I can barely wire a plug, but I’m prepared to bet that the jolt that bad boy will give you won’t be the same as licking a 9V battery.

As such, our gloves and boots are designed to insulate us against the risks of electrocution in the first moments of a crash.

They are not black leather boots.

They are not light canvas desert wear.

Handed out to us come pairs of knee high, daffodil yellow wellies. Lellow lellies.

It’s 32 degrees outside.

And I’m wearing wellies.

Better than that, i was sort of hoping to wear these boots all day, and back at camp as well, in a luggage economy sort of way.

I’m not wearing these socially. I look like a fireman fetishist.

The dress up game gets better when my overalls arrive. The company that supplied the overalls is apparently more accustomed to providing workwear for the UAE’s batallions of Thai, Indian, Pakistani and Phillipino employees, none of whom are nationalities known for their vast height and bulk.

On hearing laughter I find one of the FIV drivers struggling to pack himself into an overall. His friends haul on the sleeves to pull them up over his shoulders. The cuffs barely cover his elbows, the ankles are at half mast. He’s not a big man, standing a comfortable eight inches shorter and couple of stone lighter than me.

“Fucking hell, mate…” I start “Bet you wish you’d ordered a large, huh!?”

Struggling to breathe, he answers me.

“This is a large.”

Oh.

I unwrap the cellophane from my “extra large” overalls and, stepping into them, immediately regret it. My testicles suddenly vanish behind my kidneys and I have to recruit the assistance of two friends to wrestle me into it. The sleeves are so short and tight I am forced to stand with my arms out to my sides, like that daft public speaking thing Dubya used to do to make himself look even more preposterous. My calves start to shiver in the air conditioning and I fear the elastic cuffs around the bottom of the trouser leg will leave me with pitting oedema after a few hours. I struggle to zip it up, sucking my gut in to such an extent that my bollocks are assailed again, crushed by my sooked in belly against their new nephrological home.

Bending over in this get-up? Forget it. I’ll be absolutely fine as long as all my patients are levitating at chest height and don’t require me to move my upper body.

Or arms.

Or legs.

I get right on my phone and text Gus. That’s Gus as in “Gus the operations boss of the desert challenge”. Gus as in “Gus the professional freelance military commander.” Gus as in “Gus the man where you’re always terribly pleased to be his friend, because you’re frankly terrified of what Gus does to people he doesn’t like.”

So I dropped Gus a text saying “You’re coming along tomorrow, aren’t you? Can you swing by a mall and buy me a pair of Magnums or similar, UK size 11? Cheers.”

So that’ll be “Gus the mercenary personal shopper”, then.

I track down Bryn and Mark, the doctor and driver on my vehicle respectively and we spend an hour or so checking and familarising ourselves with the vehicle, its layout and kit. Working as part of a trauma team, I reacquaint myself with the actions and functions of pieces of equipment that I rarely see and never use. Asherman seals, chest drains and surgical airways.

The vehicle has pieces of kit that make me drool, including a brilliant traction splint that packs down to the size of a shoebox and a tourniquet that, on first examination seems to have been made from all the straps and handles that are ripped from baggage at Terminal Four, but after I’ve played with it make me want to steal it and take it home. Dead simple and super effective. Want.

Packed and prepared, Mark takes us for a…familarisation…drive around the track (this was in no way a jolly. Absolutely not me taking the opportunity to be driven round an F1 track before, say, Lewis Hamilton got a shot). The Nissan Patrol that we’re working in for the week clearly isn’t designed for speed, but it would appear that nobody has told it that. Battering around Yas Marina sideways at 110mph in a vehicle that was originally produced for Yummy Mummys to drop Tarquin and Esmerelda off to school? Bloody brilliant. From the track, the opulence of our surroundings is breathtaking, the track is outstanding fun to drive around and the colossal yachts with helipads on the back that sit in the mraina provide a fitting background.

The afternoon holds an official FIA inspection where the Gary Hartstein, the FIA doctor and general medical-boss-type of the whole venue sets us a crash to deal with. They have a little model F1 cockpit that gets dragged off to a far flung corner of the track while we, the ambulances and extrication teams go and park up in our standby points and await a scramble message from Sean in Control. The job comes in, a medical and KED team (thankfully not us, because I’m in my uniform, and can’t bend over) and after a minute we are all given clearance to proceed to the “crash site” and observe.

By the time we arrive, the KED team have extricated the patient and the medical team are working hard. The story runs that the driver made a slow escape from the track and made almost no impact with the wall, but on arrival is apneic and in cardiac arrest. A full traumatic arrest protocol swings into place and the team do a sterling job stabilising the patient while we all watch. I don’t envy the lead doctor his role, being scrutinized not only by the FIA but by his new found colleagues and team members. The exercise runs in real time from the track to the ambulance, into a resus bay and is only called to a halt by the FIA doctor when we are ready to hot-load the patient into a waiting aircraft.

Brows are mopped, people exhale hard and we all rendezvous in the ambulance bay to be debriefed.

The FIA are the spectre at the feast in all our dealings, a vast organisation that holds ultimate power over all our dealings and we’re all nervous about Doctor Hartstein’s debrief, envisaging a by-the-book dressing down.

Instead he’s animated, friendly and down to earth. He speaks our language, both in medical jargon, slang and (because let’s face it, we’re all emergency staff) profanity. He takes the time to increase our awareness of the peculiarities of F1 that some of us haven’t considered and gives us the benefit of his experience and wisdom. He closes with a smile. We’ve passed and our KED teams are later congratulated at the speed of their operation. It’s official, they are the fastest KED teams in F1 anywhere in the world, stabilising and extricating a driver from his car in two minutes flat.

The afternoon is taken up by more briefings and exercises and there is little for the medical staff to do. We sit in the clinic and, slowly but surely, boredom overtakes professionalism. A spontaenous wheelchair race begins. A competition develops as to who can reverse park the golf buggy with the greatest proficiency. At one point a train is built from an ambulance trolley and a wheel chair and we’re happily turning laps of the ambulance bay when Chris, our Chief Administrator strolls in and catches us at it.

“Just leave, Chris? Please don’t see this.”

He smiles, nods and makes himself scarce.

At the end of the evening we march in a mob towards Ferrari World, a huge structure with three enormous wings. In each armpit of these wings sits a concert venue and its in one of these venues (having had our cameras confiscated by rabid security staff) that we gather to watch Beyonce. I don’t like Beyonce, but I’ll give the girl credit, she can sing and dance. And it turns out? Once I’m a bit pissed? She’s really very good.

We pile onto buses back to the Operators Village and on arriving there we find the canteen is serving kebabs. Beer, gig, bus home and a kebab before bed. My God! I’m back in Leith!

I wake halfway through the night with a mouth like a dessicated badger’s arse and blunder about the room trying to find something to drink. In the desert I’d have taken a canteen of water to bed with me, but it would seem I’ve let things slide with the relative comfort. If I’m coming back here, I’ll need to learn how things work. It’s not the desert. It’s not home. It’s not a hotel.

Must find my niche.