Originally Posted by
Juha_Koo
Thing that has to be taken into account are different languages. Loeb's pacenotes would be nearly impossible (I said nearly ;) ) to be used in Finnish. I give an example by using three first rows of Anthony's example of Loeb's notes. Examples are written in the way of the spoken language (grammatically correct versions differ quite a bit).
Oikee täys pitkä ja pitkä nyppy suoraan.
Kakssataaviiskyt metriä, vasen satanelkyt miinus puolipitkä, älä leikkaa alussa, vähän soraa lopussa.
Sata metriä, huomio, merkiltä oikee sataviiskytkuus kirraa sata puolipitkä.
For my brains and mouth it doesn't work... Especially the "metres" part doesn't work in Finnish. But I examined the subject a bit deeper and made the following findings:
The Finnish version contains 28 words and 208 characters, while the French version contains 33 words and 218 characters. So in the light of numbers, Finnish version should be better (more condensed) but it is not so straight-forward. While in French e.g. the word "metres" is pronounced like "metr" (100 metres= "SaMetr") in Finnish it's "metrii" or "metriä" (100 metres="sata metrii"). So actually Finnish words are longer to pronounce.
Small edit: I have always believed that pacenotes have to reflect driver's personal affections, so it's very very difficult (impossible?) to completely revamp the system while it's been used for many years. For example in my opinion Novikov had the most crappy pacenotes I have ever seen (90% of the notes were "right one, left one gas, right zero, left one"). Only time I heard other number than 0 or 1 was on a tight junction "left three, out road". BUT still the guy managed to do 15 WRC stage wins, two podiums and 173 championship points. THEN AGAIN, he was very accident-prone and I can bet that pacenotes were partly to blame. But in my opinion it comes to show, that if you're a fast driver and on top of that have a good "road-eye" (like drivers in Finland have, because of the blind rallies) you don't actually need über-precise pacenote system to clock top times. You sort of "attack into the corners without knowing the shape exactly, you just have a raw idea of the (speed/turn)category of the corner" and drive it through. I could argue that this is one reason why many Finns haven't been able to make progress on tarmac.