If you were to pick a scrutineer for your tech shed, wouldn’t you want someone who has built race cars and has read the GCR cover to cover? If so, you’d probably pick Washington DC Region’s Joseph Menowsky III. He has built race cars, he’s very familiar with the contents of the GCR, and often challenges the wording of rules that aren’t completely clear. So when it came to selecting a recipient for the 2023 SCCA Scrutineer Worker of the Year Award presented by Mazda, Menowsky was the obvious pick.

Menowsky discovered the SCCA® thanks to friends. “I was a drag racer before this, and I was building a new car,” he explains. “I was with a couple friends who worked in a shop in Silver Spring, MD. We were shooting darts and drinking a few beers, and I told them I was building a drag car. They said, ‘We race,’ so I asked, ‘What do you race?’ They said Volkswagen Rabbits, and I laughed at them. They invited me to come to Summit Point, and a year later I was racing a Volkswagen Rabbit.”

Menowsky got his competition license in 1996, attending schools at Summit Point and Pocono. Before that, he crewed for about a year, then bought a car off the street, converted it into a race car, and began racing.

He found that he really enjoyed racing in the Club. “I was brought in by three-digit and four-digit members,” he says. “Those were my mentors and coaches. When the Club needed help somewhere, you were asked to do what was needed. That’s where I got that kind of mentality.”

The SCCA spirit also won him over. “The single thing that I can say caused me to stay away from drag racing and circle track racing and other types of racing that I’ve done is that the sportsmen I raced with [in the SCCA] would much rather give me the part that I needed to compete on the track against them than beat me because I couldn’t go out when I couldn’t fix my car.”

He took a break from racing in 2005 but came back in 2015-’16. When he returned, it was to Summit Point, “because that was always ‘home’ to me, even though I live closer to VIR,” he explains.

He began crewing for a friend, but it wasn’t a good match – they didn’t work well together. To remain friends, they decided not to work together. He wanted to keep coming to the track, though, so he tried his hand at Scrutineering in 2018.

Washington DC Region needed a Scrutineering chief, and because of his background in racing and skills as a car builder, they asked him to take the job.

“I used to build race cars and I have an extensive knowledge of the GCR,” he notes. “I am very critical of the words and their placement when I read the GCR. That’s what a Scrutineer does. As a racer first and a Scrutineer second, I’ll read the rules in the favor of the racer. I have to see it from their perspective. If it says you may not, then you may not. If it says you may, then you may. Then it’s cut and dried. When there’s a lot of massage room, I try to look in the favor of the competitor. That’s how I would do it myself as a racer. I enjoy the engineering.”

His reason for remaining a part of SCCA is not unusual. “Because it became a family,” he says. “I go anywhere in the country and I’m treated like one of the gang. Any organization can be a little clicky at times, but ultimately, we’re a family. There’s a structure you have to abide by, and everybody has to abide by it the same. The family stays together and takes care of each other.”

He’s volunteered in other specialties through the years, too. He’s flagged, and he did Timing & Scoring when he first came to the track. “That was before transponders,” he says. “That was back when there’d be an announcement that timers were needed, and drivers were asked to send any available crew members they had.”

He may also soon be a Steward. He has been asked to join the Steward program, but Menowsky is limited in his time to travel right now. He was asked because of his extensive knowledge of the rules, but also for one other reason: “How I keep them on their toes all the time,” he says. As Menowsky tells the story, the Club Racing Board (CRB) yelled at him one night at dinner in 2019. He kept sending letters to them for definitions at the National Championship Runoffs® to eliminate the need for interpretation on certain rules. He needed to know the intent of the rules so he could enforce them. “I don’t want to be the ‘gotcha’ guy,” he says.

For Menowsky, it’s all about giving back – and giving back to the Club is what he does very well.

Photo courtesy Joseph Menowsky III