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pacenotes
Probably my favourite motorsport of all is rallying, wherein modified versions of average road cars are run on closed roads against the clock and thusly against each other. And my favourite part of rallying is the pacenotes.
The driver/navigator team get a day or two to run reconnaissance over the race stages. That's a day or two total, not per stage. Since the roads are not, as far as I'm aware (and Lockhart will correct me if I'm wrong!), closed for recces, the cars are restricted to normal road speeds which in these parts generally amounts to a maximum speed of 60MPH. Remember that number. As they drive the road at normal road speeds, the driver "calls" the road to the navigator, who takes notes. The exact detail varies from team to team, but the essence is to take notes of major road features: length of straight sections, angle of bends, what to do with junctions, and any notable cautions such as water, loose surfaces or sudden severe changes in the road's altitude.
This is the first part of the blind trust in rallying: the driver depends on the navigator to record the notes accurately, and the navigator depends on the driver to call the road accurately.
Then we come to the actual racing part. When I said "modified versions of average road cars", there's actually a sliding scale. At the bottom of the scale you've got cars that have been driven off a showroom, fitted with safety equipment, and let loose on the rally. On the top of the scale you've got cars designed from the ground up with rallying in mind; you can usually recognise these by the suffice "WRC" on the car's name, standing for "World Rally(ing) Championship". The legendary cars off the top of the scale are the so-called "Group B" supercars, which were purpose-built by manufacturers in the mid-eighties under special regulations which only required that 250 or so of the cars be built before they were deemed "average road cars" for the purposes of racing. This process of requiring some mass production of the cars, referred to as homologation, is intended to stop manufacturers producing one-off cars solely for rallying.
So anyway. You've got a bunch of guys driving around in Subarus and Nissans and Opel/Vauxhall/GMs and Fords that aren't a whole lot different from something Honest Jim's Car Dealership will sell you in the morning, and then you've got these balls-out beasts of cars with somewhat insane creatures sitting in the position where you'd normally expect to find a driver. And thanks to the wonders of minaturisation, you have at least one camera in every major competitor's car, possibly more. The main camera is mounted behind the occupants and in the centre, looking out the windshield; other popular mount spots give views off the front of the car (the bumper mount was deemed too costly to risk after a middle-eastern driver gave a bumper's-eye view of a hedge during the major Irish rally some time in the eighties, or certainly in that timeframe, anyway), views of the driver through the front windshield, and even views of the driver from the side illustrating the gymnastics he or she goes through in the course of a rally.
Right, so you get the picture. Big beefy car. Closed road. Insane driver. He's not alone, the navigator's insane, too. He has to be. Because what he's gotta do is read back the notes taken on recce, looking more often than not as his notes rather than at the road lest he lose his place and fail to call that impending hairpin left-hander.
And this is the second part of the blind trust. The driver is trusting the navigator to read the notes accurately, and the navigator is trusting the driver to go balls out with those notes in mind to warn him when it's time to hit the brake pedal and drop a gear or two. The fun part being, that, well, remember that speed I mentioned above? Chances are they're hitting twice that, on the same roads. When I said "balls out", I meant it.
And remember those cameras? Well, you get audio to go with the rather terrifying view of a narrow country road flying by at 120MPH. Above the engine noise, there's the constant stream of pacenotes from the navigator: "100, square left, tightens. fast right over crest, 150. long easy left, caution, into absolute right over grid" Some of the corner designators vary; some teams use a words, on a scale going approximately flat, easy, [no modifier], square; some teams use a scale of numbers, say from one to five. The larger numbers are the distances (usually in metres) to the next item in the notes. A crest is a hump in the road, where it's not unusual for the car to become airborne, and a grid refers to one of those doohickies in the road to keep cattle from straying from one place to the next, because sometimes you have to get your flying car through a gateway between adjacent bits of farmland and this grid happens to be on the road in front of you.
F1 is frequently cited as the pinacle of automotive performance, because the cars can do over 200MPH and have the most advanced electronics this side of a fighter plane. Yet rallying is far more impressive for its organic nature and the fact that no matter how much technology you pile into the car, there's still a huge dependency on the driver and navigator that just can't be matched by anyone sitting in the mobile supercomputer that makes up the modern F1 car.
Go pick yourself up a copy of Mobil 1 Rally Championship (aka Rally 2000) and give it a spin from the in-car view. Lockhart says it's sufficiently authentic for him to have driven stages in the game from his memory of the real-world stages they mimic. I give it a blast any time I feel I'd like to drive like those guys do. Scares me right back to my senses.
The driver/navigator team get a day or two to run reconnaissance over the race stages. That's a day or two total, not per stage. Since the roads are not, as far as I'm aware (and Lockhart will correct me if I'm wrong!), closed for recces, the cars are restricted to normal road speeds which in these parts generally amounts to a maximum speed of 60MPH. Remember that number. As they drive the road at normal road speeds, the driver "calls" the road to the navigator, who takes notes. The exact detail varies from team to team, but the essence is to take notes of major road features: length of straight sections, angle of bends, what to do with junctions, and any notable cautions such as water, loose surfaces or sudden severe changes in the road's altitude.
This is the first part of the blind trust in rallying: the driver depends on the navigator to record the notes accurately, and the navigator depends on the driver to call the road accurately.
Then we come to the actual racing part. When I said "modified versions of average road cars", there's actually a sliding scale. At the bottom of the scale you've got cars that have been driven off a showroom, fitted with safety equipment, and let loose on the rally. On the top of the scale you've got cars designed from the ground up with rallying in mind; you can usually recognise these by the suffice "WRC" on the car's name, standing for "World Rally(ing) Championship". The legendary cars off the top of the scale are the so-called "Group B" supercars, which were purpose-built by manufacturers in the mid-eighties under special regulations which only required that 250 or so of the cars be built before they were deemed "average road cars" for the purposes of racing. This process of requiring some mass production of the cars, referred to as homologation, is intended to stop manufacturers producing one-off cars solely for rallying.
So anyway. You've got a bunch of guys driving around in Subarus and Nissans and Opel/Vauxhall/GMs and Fords that aren't a whole lot different from something Honest Jim's Car Dealership will sell you in the morning, and then you've got these balls-out beasts of cars with somewhat insane creatures sitting in the position where you'd normally expect to find a driver. And thanks to the wonders of minaturisation, you have at least one camera in every major competitor's car, possibly more. The main camera is mounted behind the occupants and in the centre, looking out the windshield; other popular mount spots give views off the front of the car (the bumper mount was deemed too costly to risk after a middle-eastern driver gave a bumper's-eye view of a hedge during the major Irish rally some time in the eighties, or certainly in that timeframe, anyway), views of the driver through the front windshield, and even views of the driver from the side illustrating the gymnastics he or she goes through in the course of a rally.
Right, so you get the picture. Big beefy car. Closed road. Insane driver. He's not alone, the navigator's insane, too. He has to be. Because what he's gotta do is read back the notes taken on recce, looking more often than not as his notes rather than at the road lest he lose his place and fail to call that impending hairpin left-hander.
And this is the second part of the blind trust. The driver is trusting the navigator to read the notes accurately, and the navigator is trusting the driver to go balls out with those notes in mind to warn him when it's time to hit the brake pedal and drop a gear or two. The fun part being, that, well, remember that speed I mentioned above? Chances are they're hitting twice that, on the same roads. When I said "balls out", I meant it.
And remember those cameras? Well, you get audio to go with the rather terrifying view of a narrow country road flying by at 120MPH. Above the engine noise, there's the constant stream of pacenotes from the navigator: "100, square left, tightens. fast right over crest, 150. long easy left, caution, into absolute right over grid" Some of the corner designators vary; some teams use a words, on a scale going approximately flat, easy, [no modifier], square; some teams use a scale of numbers, say from one to five. The larger numbers are the distances (usually in metres) to the next item in the notes. A crest is a hump in the road, where it's not unusual for the car to become airborne, and a grid refers to one of those doohickies in the road to keep cattle from straying from one place to the next, because sometimes you have to get your flying car through a gateway between adjacent bits of farmland and this grid happens to be on the road in front of you.
F1 is frequently cited as the pinacle of automotive performance, because the cars can do over 200MPH and have the most advanced electronics this side of a fighter plane. Yet rallying is far more impressive for its organic nature and the fact that no matter how much technology you pile into the car, there's still a huge dependency on the driver and navigator that just can't be matched by anyone sitting in the mobile supercomputer that makes up the modern F1 car.
Go pick yourself up a copy of Mobil 1 Rally Championship (aka Rally 2000) and give it a spin from the in-car view. Lockhart says it's sufficiently authentic for him to have driven stages in the game from his memory of the real-world stages they mimic. I give it a blast any time I feel I'd like to drive like those guys do. Scares me right back to my senses.