Keng's recipe: Guide to a crispy pace notes

'How can you drive blindly so fast on roads that you've never driven before?' - I get this question a lot from friends when they found that I drive rally cars. I would answer them, no, I don't drive blindly, not literally at least 'coz we have a recipe, a recipe called crispy pace notes.

The two main ingredients of making a pace notes are one cup of distance and three spoonful of corner severity. Distance is how far is the next corner in meters while corner severity is the angle of corner, much like the needle of a clock.

If all I get from them is a blur face, I'd stop right there. But if they say, "I want more!", I tell them to read on ... :)

Before I started rallying, I used to think that there would be arrows displayed on the windscreen telling you what corners are coming up ahead. It's like what you'd find in Sega Rally, yeah, you remember that game don't ya?

Not exactly this arrow but you get my drift

What you need now is a steering marker. I'm sure most of you recognize this as the yellow strip on a Momo or Sparco steering, or from the in-car view for you RBR gamers. The marker is situated permanently at the 12 o'clock position of the steering wheel. If your steering don't have this, you can always make one by wrapping a masking tape at the top center.

1/2" masking tape & marker pen

 Make a roll around the grip of the wheel, press them firmly as they tend to move if the surface doesn't stick

Now a tape on the dashboard as the center reference point

For my pace notes, I use a 1 to 6 range, 6 being a fast corner. What I'll do is I'll mark the position of these numbers on the steering wheel and a center reference point on the dashboard. I don't mark +/- on the wheel as fewer markers makes the reading a lot quicker, you don't need that much effort to read the numbers written on it, just a quick glance will do ~ Trust me, you'll get bored and exhausted when you do an over 30km stage notes and you'll want to keep things simple.

Start with from top & work down from there

You can do all the way down to 1. You might notice that the larger numbers have lesser degrees between them, that's how important fast corners are ;)

All you need to do next is drive down the stage and keep to the middle of the road. Mark down the distance you started from one corner to the other in meters. Once you've reached a corner, steer into the corner so that the 12 o'clock marker is pointed to the corner. Now, look at the marker's number on your wheel that is inline with your reference center point on the dashboard. This your corner severity.

Turn the wheel until the center marker points (not your front tires) to the corner

And there you have it, the number at the top center is the corner severity. Repeat this for 1,000 times. 

Another way of doing it is to mark on the dashboard instead. Your steering wheel will still have the marker at the top center BUT your severity markers will be on the dashboard. Drive down a stage and instead of reading your steering, you're now reading the number on your dashboard. The cons about this method is you don't always get a rental car with the perfect shaped dashboard that allows you to do this. I don't use my own car for recce, thus, I don't have the luxury to choose what kinda of dashboard I want and even if I do, chances are I won't get the same make & model of recce car the next time I drive one.

How the hell am I going to mark this dashboard?

Some drivers are more comfortable with descriptive corner like fast/medium/slow which is more like a speed notes rather than a pace notes. I can't say if there is no good or bad pace note system, its a good system as long as they work for you. We do adopt some of the speed notes style which IMO is easier if you can estimate what speed you'll be doing later at rally time during the recce.

I refer a lot to onboard videos of the late great Colin McRae and Markko Martin for my pace notes. Both of them uses the numberative corner severity with easy to listen additional notes. With abundant videos on YouTube, and their flamboyant style of driving, it makes learning process so much fun. I would listen to Grist and Beef's calls on my earphone during working hours just to get myself into the 'zone' prior to a rally.

I took a lot of advice during the early years by going with the most basic pace notes system and slowly worked our way up from there. I can say that although its been three years, I still find myself trying to improvise the pace notes to allow us to drive faster and of course, safer.

So that my friends, is how you make a crispy pace notes :)

p.s. There are a lot of things I want to share but that'll make this entry too long, I'll be sharing more advance notes and probably things of do's and don'ts of recce.