Speaking the Road: Why We Run Descriptive Pacenotes

Ask any rally crew about their pacenotes and you'll quickly learn they're a very, very personal thing. At their heart, pacenotes are simply a description of the road in front of you — a running commentary that lets you drive as confidently and as quickly as you possibly can down a road you may only have seen once. But how you write them, and how you hear them, is unique to every driver. There's endless conjecture in this sport about which system is best, and the truth is it all comes down to the individual in the end. For me, descriptive notes win every time.

There are more than two systems out there, but the two you'll hear about most are numbered and descriptive. A numbered system runs on severity — one to six, or one to ten — and crews will even swap the numbers around, so for one team a ten might be the fastest corner and for another it might be the slowest. Think of it like a dial with 360 degrees of choice for how severe the bend ahead of you is. That's one way to do it. But the way the road makes sense to my brain is to describe what it's actually like in front of me. So instead of a ten meaning flat-out, we call it absolute, and it steps down from there: absolute, fast, easy, medium, K or square, bad, very bad, and hairpin at the very end. The choice of how severe a corner is hasn't gone away — it's just delivered as a word instead of a number, and it's up to the driver to interpret it.

Why does that matter so much to me? Because it's an audible prompt with no conversion attached. If Kirsty calls a number — one, two, three — I have to hear it and then translate it into what the corner actually is. But if she calls "bad," I instantly understand a bad corner is coming. If she calls "medium," or something we can take flat, there's no little micro-moment of that's a three, okay, that's a square, so I've got two of those. The guesswork is taken out. It's just instant, and that split-second saving means I carry a little more confidence into every corner on the stage.

Of course, no system is free. Descriptive calls can take longer to say — a number might be one syllable, where we sometimes have a whole string of description to get out, so Kirsty occasionally has to talk a bit faster than she otherwise would. But because my brain registers what's happening faster, the speed she reads at doesn't really cost us anything. Writing the notes and doing the recce takes no longer than a numbered system either. The one real catch is a new co-driver: coming from numbers to descriptive, there's a get-used-to-it period, and that's when you back off a touch of speed to make sure a "medium" isn't confused with a "K," or an "easy" — a couple of the severities sit close together. It's not difficult or onerous to pick up, but it takes a little trust to build.

And when that trust is there, it's everything. The calls that give me the most confidence on a stage are the absolute calls — and a flat crest where Kirsty puts "okay" on the end. "Absolute, crest, okay" tells me we can attack a crest we can't see over, because the car won't be unsettled and the takeoff will be balanced. Crest, okay means it's straight, it won't fly badly, just go. When she says it — and you can hear in her voice that she really means you can go for it — you stick your foot in as far as it'll go. That's the whole point of the way we do this: turning the road into words my brain already trusts, so I can be as brave as the moment allows.