Mads Ostberg

[Antony Warmbold]

Really nice! Many thanks for all these info!

I have two questions for you:
How easy is it to add more and more info in your pace notes? By adding more details (like Loeb in your example) you must have the mental ability to analyse all that in the stage and drive accordingly. Although a more simplistic system (e.g. Petter) will allow to concentrate more on driving than analysing the pace notes.
Have you ever come across places where you wanted to add more info, but you know beforehand this is too much to process while driving in the stage? (out of curiosity, what system did you use?)

I appreciate that processing pace notes while driving is second nature to rally drivers, but I am not convinced that everyone (even among the current top drivers) can do it equally well.

I believe the key things are:

1. enough time for the co-drriver to read the info.

2. that the info follows an order and a logic that your brain can process efficiently.

3. a lot of work learning to process the info as you are driving. My wife is a pianist and when I see her read a classical partition (which is extremely complicated) and play at the same time something different with each hand plus her foot sometimes pushing the pedal I understand the skill required and years of practice it took to get there!

4. you need to start early in your adulthood to train your brain to listen to lots of info and be able to take it in and use it as you're driving. This will help understand what I mean: http://www.uknow.gse.harvard.edu/lea...growthcyc.html

I started practicing listening and acting on it with Colin McRae Rally on PC when I was a teen.

My system was angle based with lots of corner shape descriptions and lots of speed details. I included a page of my notes as an example. It reads:

left entry little faster right ninety four keep out and
caution shorter left ninety entry immediate slower second right ninety three into ninety fast entry over crest left bad 3rd gear ok
and 100 faster left ninety in and triple caution special right entry over crest into 50
special much slower third right ninety three entry into twenty super short right ninety three and ...

-->just as an example the last line explained:

special - it's a tricky corner / much slower - self explanatory / third - the apex is 3 times farther around the corner than "normal" / right ninety three - it's a ninety degree corner in third gear / into - it's a combination corner and there is no direction change / 20 - distance until that next corner / super short - very sharp corner / ... "plus sign" - and (direction change)

The underlining tells the co-driver to read fast and the double underlining very fast. These notes were derived from my dad's, I modernized them and adapted them to my preferences and added gear indications among other things. I also got inspired from others. For example "Go" right something indicates it's a full throttle corner no matter what and "Braking" as in "flat right braking into 100 turn right ninety two". I got those from Richard Burns of whom I was a big fan.