Gelina Lutaro is 50 years old, a single mother of five, and an FIA-certified intervention marshal at this year’s inaugural Spanish Grand Prix. Getting there took 18 years, most of them spent away from the children she was doing it all for.
People call her Ghie. Her kids -Jonard, Jeric, Joven, Jolina, and Jelaine-are the reason she left Tabaco City in the Bicol region of the Philippines for Abu Dhabi in November 2007. She was hired as a domestic worker for an Arab family, and by her own account, the four years that followed were rough. She doesn’t go into detail about it. What she will say is that the experience taught her things, some good, some bad, and that she learned early to keep the good lessons and let go of the rest.
By 2011 she wanted out of that household. The problem was practical: domestic workers rarely get a day off, so there was almost no way to job-hunt through normal channels. She made her own channel instead. Every time her employers sent her to a supermarket or mall, she’d find the Filipino cashiers working the registers and ask, quietly, if they knew of any family looking for help.
One of them did. She handed Ghie an address for an agency that placed nannies with expat families. Ghie called, got interviewed over the phone, and landed a job with an American family tied to NYU Abu Dhabi. She says they treated her with real kindness. That family eventually left the Emirates, but her name stuck around inside that university’s expat network-she kept working as a nanny for one NYU Abu Dhabi family after another for years, sending money home the whole time, watching her children grow up mostly through phone calls.
In 2015, almost by accident, the second half of her life started. Her roommate, a Filipino named Ryan Doloroso, asked if she wanted to volunteer as a race marshal. No pay involved. She said yes before he finished the sentence.
To understand why, go back further-She grew up watching car races on television in the Philippines, in the years when Michael Schumacher’s name was inescapable. She used to wonder if she’d ever watch a real race in person, whether she’d ever get the chance at all. That question followed her through her move to Abu Dhabi, through four hard years with her first employer, through the long, patient search for better families to work for. Ryan’s offer-unglamorous-was the first real opening she’d had to answer it herself.
She trained as a flag marshal, then intervention marshal, then fire marshal, then digital panel operator-each one a separate certification, earned on her own time, at posts along the track where the job is to respond fast when something goes wrong: a car on fire, a driver trapped in a wrecked cockpit, debris that has to clear before the next wave of traffic comes through. None of it pays. She did it anyway, race after race, working her way up to Post Chief, the marshal responsible for an entire station on the circuit.
By the end of 2015 she was marshaling national races in the UAE alongside international fixtures-the Lamborghini and Ferrari Challenge, the Fun Cup, the Gulf 12 Hours, the Le Mans 24 Hours, car drifting events. Then, in 2018, she worked her first Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. She calls it the happiest day of her life to that point-adrenaline, and the answer to a question she’d been carrying since she was ten. She went back every year after that, 2018 through 2021, each one adding another patch to her tabard collection.
Move to Spain
It didn’t last. In 2023 the NYU Abu Dhabi families she worked for started heading back to the United States, and Ghie moved to Spain. What followed were two years without legal status-she doesn’t dress that period up. It would have been reason enough for most people to drop an unpaid hobby in a country they weren’t cleared to stay in. Ghie did the opposite. She spent those two years running the same play she’d run in the supermarkets years before: reaching out to every marshal she’d ever crossed paths with, especially the international ones, keeping those relationships alive so she could get back on a track once her papers came through. She’d already decided, long before she had any legal right to act on it, that she was going to marshal in Spain.
This month, at the first-ever Spanish Grand Prix in Madrid, that decision finally paid off. She worked the race wearing an Intervention Marshal, Course Access tabard. She calls Madrid just the beginning.
I should explain how I ended up hearing any of this. I got to Madrid by way of the Monza Grand Prix and the Venice Film Festival, landing the evening of September 9. I’d missed an early-morning track tour I’d come a day ahead of schedule to catch, so rather than waste the morning, I walked the circuit a different way, from the photographers’ wall along the fence. Somewhere along that walk, past a stage where drivers were being interviewed in front of a growing crowd, I noticed a woman whose face I recognized before I could say why. ‘Are you Filipino, ate?’ I asked. She said yes. That’s how it started.
Hearing her full story afterward hit me harder than I expected, and the part that has stayed with me the longest isn’t the marshal training or the bib or even Madrid. It’s this: Ghie hasn’t seen her five children in three years. Jonard, Jeric, Joven, Jolina and Jelaine have grown up mostly on video calls, raised at a distance by a mother trying to give them a better shot than she got. Her hope, she told me, is to see her youngest graduate next year-one more milestone she’s missed in person, and one she’s now counting down to.
That is what perseverance actually costs. Ghie’s version ran for eighteen years, through a bad employer, through unpaid weekends spent training to fight fires and pull people out of wrecked cars, through two years without legal papers in a country not her own, through birthdays and report cards and ordinary Tuesdays she wasn’t there for. The dream she’d been chasing since she was ten years old finally caught up with her in Madrid this September. But it caught up with her without her kids beside her, because keeping them fed and in school was the whole reason the dream had to wait as long as it did.
She got the marshal’s tabard in the end. She earned every patch the same way-piece by piece, year by year, on her own time, thousands of miles from home. What she is still waiting on is the one she wants most: to be in the stands, not on a circuit, when her youngest walks across a stage next year.