Some History

When Rod began his rallying career co-drivers were called navigators because in those days the poor sods had to use Army ordinance maps plotting specified grid references and trying to accurately measure the road on the map with a thing called a roamer! This was a ruler which was about 150 mm (6 inches) long, and was specially marked to comply with the scale on the maps.

Often the cars had primitive mileage measuring devices.

I remember spending hours fitting a SMITHS Speedo to my car because it had a trip function that could be manually adjusted by either winding the thing forward or back and or pushing it in to cancel.

The organisers of the events used to give the crews pages of instructions which the navigator had to decipher, not only did he have to plot his way technically but he also had to try and figure out where the director of the event really wanted him to go.

This was not always straight forward and very often the guy had to negotiate his way through what was called a "Farmer Brown" type of section which was always set out in a cryptic manner and used to cause all sorts of dramas for the crews but was always great fun.

Evolution

The sport has evolved from mapped events to what we call "Route Chart" or Special Stage events.

For these events the organisers have to go out and find suitable roads on which they can run special stages. They have to plot the stage accurately measuring the distances from the start point to the end and give independent distances between junctions and hazards.

Then they have to draw what is known as "Tulip Arrows" to indicate each junction. These have to be drawn very accurately as the competitors rely upon the angles created by the tulips to help them determine the severity or otherwise of the turns.

Tulips are used for bends in the road as well as junctions and also sometimes are needed to indicate which way to go around a particular hazard.

After the Director of an event has got all of this done he then has to pass it onto another person who then goes out and "checks" the course.

This ensures that to the best of everybody's ability the route is as accurate as possible.

The navigator or co-driver, as he is now more often called, still plays the major role in determining where the driver has to go, as he is the one who's job it is to interpret the tulip's and keep track of the distance between each instruction.

Then counting the driver down to each so that he may approach and negotiate the junction as accurately and fast as possible.

These type of events still make up the majority of rallies in Australia.

World Rally Championship

In 1988 Australia conducted a trial event in Western Australia which was to be evaluated as a round of the World Rally Championship.

This brought Pace Notes into Australian rallying for the first time.

Now, all the Australian Rally Championship events are pace noted and there are also a few State Championship events using pace notes.

It is history now that Western Australia ran 18 WRC events, the last being in 2006, sadly for Western Australia and the sport in general the rights to the event were given up by the State Government for what seems like no particular reason.

The sports governing body - CAMS did little to help as it wanted to move the event to the other side of the country on the east coast and as it had been angling for this to happen since the event showed that it was viable (many years ago) there was no way it seemed that CAMS was interested in help it stay in Western Australia, despite a private consortium getting The financial backing and the State Government being prepared to pay half the running costs.

The story was that the FIA and CAMS did not want the event to be run by a private body...Now the event has gone from Australia with supposed return in 2008 somewhere in Queensland, rumour has it that it is to be run by a private consortium..lol

Making Notes

Making pace notes of the course involves each crew, driver and co-driver traversing the rally stages which have already been route charted by the organisers, this is referred to as recce.. (reconnaissance)

At first there was no time limit or any limits imposed, which meant that crews could take as many passes over the stages as they wished.

This enabled them to:

1. Ensure that the notes were correct.

2. Actually practice the stage.

Things have changed...now if you get two runs over the stages you are lucky.

In fact in World Championship events you only get two!!

This means that what we call "Pace Notes" should really be called "Safety Notes".

Why?

Because with only two runs you cannot PRACTICE the stages.