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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.
Comment part 1
Lockhart will correct me if I'm wrong
*stretch* *yawn* Did somebody call?
Not anything that really needs to be corrected, but a few minor comments follow. Those who aren't interested in technical details of rally navigation would be advised to ignore what follows.
In UK rallies the situation is usually a little different, in that only three of them (if you include the Ulster) run on common-or-garden public roads (the Jim Clark and the Tour of Mull are the others; the Isle of Man is in something of a grey area vis a vis the UK, hence its omission). Most of the loose-surface rallies are on private roads (generally owned by the Forestry Commission, who charge hefty fees for their use).
In general the organisers tend to be worried about PR problems being caused by the recce (sometimes these fears are justified). As a result, competiors have to use something like a conventional road car (on the events in which I've competed, anything with a roll cage was banned from the recce). Speed limits are usually below the national limit -- typically 30 or 40mph -- and there will be members of the organising team waving radar guns and fines around.
Usually, the recce allows two runs at a stage (sometimes it's only one, which is pretty scary). The idea is that the first run produces a half-decent set of notes, and the second is to check for errors. Of course, if a stage has been used in previous years, an experienced crew will already have a set of notes to which they can make minor refinements. As regards loking up or down, I've found I spend a lot of time watching the road, partly to note significant landmarks (handy for keeping the place, or regaining it if you lose it), and partly to keep track of what is happening (it's very easy for a driver to get more interested in driving the road than talking about it). I also keep an eye on the speedo during the recce...
As regards the notes themselves, the "descriptive" system you gave above, a typical sequence would be "absolute" (optional, to be used with drivers who tend to back off with calls of "flat"), "flat", "easy" or "slight", "medium", "bad" or "K" [1], "square" or "90", "hairpin". There are additional modifiers to these, such as "long", "open" (e.g. "open hairpin left": a change in the direction of travel of more than 90 degrees, but one which doesn't require the handbrake), or "maybe" ("flat left maybe" = "left-hand bend at which you should back off just a little"). I have to admit that I prefer the numeric systems, although there is a split between those which use higher numbers for slower bends and those which use them for faster ones. The driver,however, should be the one who dictates the choice of system.
Additionally, there are calls such as "keep right over jump" which are intended to direct the driver towards the best landing area (the big tree on the left being a sub-optimal landing area). There is also the need to mark places where groups of corners need to be called together. An example I remember from Mull was (in the rather simple and moderately popular system we were using, where the angle of the bend is divided by 10 to give a single digit number) "caution, crest into left 3 into right 9" [2]. Another navigator paused after the "left 3", and the crew wound up more than 200 metres from the road, having jumped over a series of ravines (the driver swore that they had gone over the top of a couple of pine trees which were in those ravines) on their way down the hillside. Somehow, their car stayed upright.
If they work perfectly, pacenotes are not just an accurate description of the road, they are a mnemonic which help the driver to visualise the road.
Comment part 2
When actually competing, I again find that I spend a lot of time looking forward as well as reading: you need to be aware of the surroundings to keep that place. Typically, you describe features of the road which are about two corners ahead, although this is adjusted for long straights or sequences of closely spaced bends. Reading pace notes in the dark can be spooky: (especially if the recce was in daylight) it's much easier to lose your place on the notes, especially on very quick sections where the seat of the pants doesn't pass on much data, if you can't see the road properly. Note that navigator seats are usually set lower in the car, and further back, to optimise the driver's field of view. A strong stomach, or a well-chosen cocktail of chemicals, is important if you don't want to throw up inside a crash helmet.
The point at which it can get really silly is if the crew decide, while competing, that some detail of the notes needs to be amended. The navigator then has to make a note of the amendment while continuing to read the other notes to the driver, without losing track of the car's position on the stage.
As regards Mobil 1 Rally Chmpionship, the stage graphics were built up from in-car video footage, hence their accuracy (although some parts have been tweaked for "artisitic" reasons). I actually found the pace notes in the game to be inadequate: lots of distinction between slow and very slow corners, hardly any between faily fast, fast and very fast (this is the opposite of how real pacenotes should work). The physics of vehicle motion didn't quite work either: there are some very weird effects at low speeds. Still, it's probably the closest thing I've seen to an accurate simulation of rally driving, and the roads are terrifyingly (accurately!) narrow.
I'll close with a brief comment on speeds. I've seen 120 mph while navigating in a 1300cc car. On most events, "World Rally Cars" will be geared for a maximum speed of between 120 and 140, as anything higher will compromise acceleration. About five years ago, however, organisers set up a radar gun on a long straight in Kielder Forest during an event (a venue notorious for long straights, tight corners, deep ditches and serious accidents). One competitor recorded a speed of 168 mph. On gravel. On a road which is about 10 feet. With deep ditches. And pine trees beyond the ditches.
[1] The origins of this are that it depicts driving along the main axis of the letter, then turning onto the further stalk; a bend of 45-60 degrees, say. Its use probably arose from the fact that "bad" can be misheard as "flat" by the driver: Juha Kankkunen did this in Catalonia in 1995 with predictable consequences. Also, some crews use "bad" to describe bends between "K" and "90".
[2] "Into" means that the next feature follows immediately after its predecessor. The shortest numeric distance you're likely to hear anyone use is "30". Dsitances between "into" and "30" tend to be covered by "and".