My Experience, Jack Rees

On Tuesday 12th of November 9 of us from Coleg Cambria were to be trained as scrutineers so we had an official meeting with Jerome, who was an FIA official, the meeting was due to start at 7pm. During the meeting you had to focus for two reasons, one it was important to know the regulations for the rally, two it was hard to understand the French, Swedish and Scottish officials through their thick accents. Towards the end of the meeting my head was full of information which I thought I would forget by the following morning surprisingly I didn't!
Wednesday was a shock to me because we had to be at the Toyota Service Park for 9am I thought that was early, when I arrived there I got the biggest buzz, fully kitted out with my Coleg Cambria jumper and my scrutineers bib on with my Wales Rally Pass just walking through the security, because I could! After being there for about half an hour I realised I was there at the Service Park but I didn't have a clue what to do, it turned out that we didn't have anything to do there, but we were needed back at the college at around lunchtime to check the rally cars in. It took a while for the cars to come but as it got later they began to come more frequently, I still felt lost and didn't really know what to do, I think none of us did, we just floated around the workshop watching what was going on eventually I think we all realised that we needed to put forward to get involved, so I went to the weigh-in team to observe what went on, some went to kit checking and some went to the components sealing. That night we all finished early because little did we know the rest of the scrutineers wanted us at the Service Park for quarter to 6 in the morning and only the day before I thought 9am was early, I clearly misunderstood the situation.
So Thursday came and I felt like a zombie at 4 o'clock in the morning, that day I knew I had to opt in at any opportunity that arose, 6am came and so did the Swedish official, when he came we knew he came bearing instructions, anger and badly pronounced English words, straight away he demanded that he needed 4 tyre checkers so Brandon, Dan, Tom and I stepped forwards, little did we know we would turn in to the 4 musketeers. As the FIA official described how to use the scanner he was insistent that we had to turn off the equipment after all the tyres had been scanned because quote " it is errr... constantly searching for ze weefee(wi-fi)" I don't know if it was the time of day but I couldn't help but find this hilarious and I couldn't laugh not when he was giving strict instructions, so I did the normal thing and tried to hide my laugh in a screen of coughs and sneezes. So mine and Toms job was to scan the bar-codes on the tyres we stuck with that job for most of the day with very little breaks. after the qualifiers we had to check the cars in to Park Ferme after checking the tyres we both looked at all the cars parked up and were impressed that we were stood in a fenced of area with around £5.5 million worth of cars. After that we were not needed again that day until later when they were getting checked back in from the stages, so we took a wander around the Service Area but there was only so much we could look at before we finished, unfortunately for Dan and Tom they had drawn the short straw and stayed late, taking one for the team.
Friday was yet another early morning we had a fun 80+ mile drive to Newtown in South Wales, to check the cars in and out with the bar-coders and stickers on the rims courtesy of Dan and Brandon. One of the privateers who had come all the way from Japan reversed out of his bay straight in to another non-rally car, where he succeeded in breaking someone's rear light. After the journey home the others were lucky and went home for some sleep, I however decided to stay it was fairly smooth when the rally cars returned to be checked in because they came in two minutes intervals!
Saturday, we decided to use Dan's self-invested rally car taxi to go to a stage in Chirk, after the eventful journey of Dan's splitter cleaning the road, doing its job as a mud plough and getting through the 6 mile back gridlock we arrived! That was the first mission, the second was to find Tom in among thousands of people. All in all the Chirk stage was a disappointment!
Sunday the final day, we were only needed for about an hour and a half when we had to be there for 6am, but by Sunday we were all used to getting up early! The scrutineers asked for a volunteer to go to Clocaenog for the power stage tyre checking, I put myself forwards and it was worth doing because I got the World Champions autograph on the back of my rally pass. So on the way home we stopped and got a McDonald's as a treat. So as my experience came to an end I looked back and thought i'm so glad I took this opportunity to try out scrutineering.