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On pace notes
This acticle was adapted from Ivan Orisek's response to a discussion on Rally-L:
The main reason behind our "blind" rallies was the desire to avoid the need to practice for several days before the rally, which may be taking place 3,000 miles away and, thus, lower the cost of rallying.
My experience with preparing and using pace notes in Europe is as follows: Pace notes are easy to follow if prepared and used properly. They are better and easier to use than our tulip roadbooks but they are not a panacea. People who go off regularly may go off with pace notes too. Top teams in World Rally crash at times because of errors in their pace notes - just watch the tapes and listen to top drivers' admissions.The people who started this discussion aimed at improving our tulip roadbooks have a point. Now, I understand the difficulties in preparing roadbooks and time and effort involved - I have done it myself. What follows should not therefore be understood as idle criticism of people who prepare our roadbooks, because we are grateful for their efforts.
Our roadbooks are generally very sketchy as fas as special stages go. It is very common to have a stage description with the next instruction several miles away. On the way, there may be several difficult, hidden or deceiving turns, which are not shown in the roadbook. Finally, when you get to that next turn shown in the roadbook, you may find it to be simpler or easier than those turns not shown in the roadbook and you wonder whether your mileage is correct.
Similarly, some important things may be missing from the roadbooks entirely, either because they did not appear to be important to the author of the roadbook at 30 miles per hour or were simply forgotten.
Most of us have the experience when we had to scramble in a turn and then we found later that half of the field had to scramble or went off in the same turn. There is one divisional rally which we happened to win two times in a row. Every year, we gave the organizer a written note about a jump not marked in the roadbook. We were jumping over a brow with a dropoff on the right and the road dropping down and slightly to the left. I believe that to this day this event does not have this place marked in the roadbook in any way.
I understand the difference between regular pace notes, which I have experience with, and the so called supplied route notes, which are being proposed as a possible solution for us. To be sure, there are some people with an outstanding ability to cope with our current system and excel. That still does not mean that we do not need more detailed roadbooks for special stages to make rallying better and safer.
I do not know whether the solution is in the supplied route notes. The drop in DNF rate due to accidents in Scotland, from 40 percent in 1996 to 6 percent in 1997, allegedly caused only by switching from blind rallies in 1966 to commercially supplied route notes in 1997 does not appear to be realistic. These are the figures quoted by the proponents of commercially supplied route notes. It is very likely that there must have been other reasons too and I believe that there is a continuing controversy about it. Also, the proponets of supplied route notes claim that at one point, a part-time supplier of route notes caused a 33 percent rise in the accidents. If so, this would appear to be a reason against and not for this concept.
There are a number of pace noting systems in current use. There are only two main requirements for a pace note system agreed upon between the driver and the co-driver: The pace notes have to be descriptive enough and, at the same time, simple enough so the driver and the co-driver will understand them in the rally car, at speed without any ambiguities. The nine Scottish systems shown on their Web site do not cover the range of possibilities. However, I think it is unrealistic to split ninety degrees into nine different kinds of turns as they are suggesting. Such a degree of detail is of no use in the rally car.There are some good books on rally co-driving, mostly of British origin, which show different kinds of systems and give examples. Also, they give examples of the differences between pace notes prepared by two different teams using the same system on the same section of the road. Then there are video tapes such as "Snow Rally" with a book of McRae's pace notes from the 1992 Arctic Rally. McRae is using a reversed 1 through 6 system with 6 being flat out. Then there is "In Car Manx Experience" with a book of pace notes, showing Pauline Taylor saying things like "Eroll Flynn into Swashbuckler Right and Bloomer Right Fifty Let Them Swing Right". On the World Rally tapes, Repo says to Kankkunen "Easy Right and Medium left into Very Long Bad Right".
When you start using pace notes for the first time, you hardly see any difference in your stage times. It takes a good amount of time both for the driver and the co-driver to get used to a particular system to be able to use it to their advantage and trust their pace notes. On that note, it is next to impossible to take pace notes prepared by somebody else and, without further practice or checking the notes, go immediately faster or "safer" than with a good tulip roadbook. Contrary to some suggestions, there is no time, no need and it is outright harmful for the driver to repeat the instruction and it is therefore never done, as documented by in-car cameras in leading cars.
Pace notes are usually prepared in advance and then they are checked in practice. In the old days, there used to be open unlimited practice on stages at speed, making sure that the traffic was only in one direction. In those days, it took two runs to prepare or check the notes and up to six runs at speed to practice them. Today, many rallies limit practice only to two passes in a convoy at 30 miles per hour in unmarked Group N cars though I believe that this year in Portugal there were very few limitations other than the use of Group N cars. Drivers keep their pace notes forever and improve them every year as they gain more experience with the particular event. On World Championship rallies, FIA allows practice of non-entrants, practicing for the next year event, for a fee of around $3,000.
Whatever it is worth, thirty years ago we learned the following "Scandinavian" system. A printable description can be obtained by clicking on
