Recce notes

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Morison

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NoCoast
Technically his death happened during a hill climb weekend while driving his Forester road car not while racing.

Technically his death happened during recce...

Techically he was coming back down the top of the mountain and was on his way to the hotel.

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Grant Hughes

Steering ratio or type of vehicle doesn't matter whatsoever in this method of note building because the reference point on the steering wheel is set based upon what the angle of the corner is. A similar system is not on the rally car and would be useless anyhow since the amount of steering angle required to navigate a corner at recce speed is less than the steering angle at rally speed.
So really, this is just to get a decent baseline on the first pass of recce, then cleaned up and fine tuned on the second pass.

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Grant Hughes

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john vanlandingham
never mind, Keith is the expert veteran driver...

Everybody just do everything Morison says and you'll win everytime just like he has since forever.

I was just clarifying my point John since you clearly mis-read, mis-understood or, possibly, purposley misrepresented what I said.

Your claim:

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john vanlandingham
What Morison is asserting, that it doesn't make any difference, means it doesn't make any difference what the steering ratio is, and thus there is no need for quick racks.

is dead wrong. I neither asserted, nor suggested that.

Also, I don't claim to be a good driver, although I did reasonably well - in context - when I did drive. When I say that the wheels should be pointed straight ahead, relative to the car, in the middle of the corner that comes from watching what the REALLY fast drivers are doing and, of course, carries the caveat of 'usually' since things don't always work out right.

I can co-drive at a pace much faster than I can drive at and I do have a lot (relative) of experience with writing pace notes from scratch and have help many people learn to write better notes using this exact idea.

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First Rally: 2001
Driver (7), Co-Driver (44)
Drivers (16)
Clerk (10), Official (7), Volunteer (4)
Cars Built (1), Engines Built (0) Cages Built (0)
Last Updated, January 4, 2015

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john vanlandingham
Blame is for idiots. losers.

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aj_johnson
Is this a common practice for recce? I've never done recce but this seems like an interesting method.

To answer the original question:
From my experience it is neither common nor uncommon - so you'll see it from time to time but not all the time. But it IS effective at building consistent notes when starting from a blank piece of paper. (And you need consistency to be able to trust your notes enough to go fast.)

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First Rally: 2001
Driver (7), Co-Driver (44)
Drivers (16)
Clerk (10), Official (7), Volunteer (4)
Cars Built (1), Engines Built (0) Cages Built (0)
Last Updated, January 4, 2015

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john vanlandingham
Blame is for idiots. losers.

this is starting to read like a cone squishing forum, i can see the argument both ways, what ever method chris is using appears to be working.

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BJosephD
what ever method chris is using appears to be working.

/thread/argument

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Welcome to the cult of JVL drink the koolaid or be banned.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/31/2012 09:43PM by Dazed_Driver.

A.J., I have them somewhere (or more precisely, I have the code that list various base turning radii for several of the Gibeaults cars and my own OBS, and the rest of the radii are calculated based on that from some experiments Mike did several years ago), but it's mostly irrelevant for a single driver making his own notes - especially at our level of driving. The important thing is to find some marks so that you're consistent across the whole event. If they're a little different from the last event, it's ok because as soon as you do the first stage you'll rescale your expectations and store that in your short term memory.

You need to be broadly consistent - if you've been doing all your notes in a car where a "3" is a 90 degree turn of the wheel and suddenly go to a quick rack car where the same "3" is a mere 45 degrees, you'll be way off in the precision. But if you're going from the first car to car where the "3" is 95 degrees, you'll adapt pretty quickly, albeit with a little loss of time on Stage 1.

The reason the Gibeaults are absolutely fussy about it and recalibrate if the car is changed is because organizer notes have to be consistent across events, particularly when there's no recce. Remember, when you're making your own notes you get to see the road, so on that first stage you've got your road memory to help you from blowing through that apparently-too-tight "3". If there's no recce, drivers don't have that preview to work from, and a lot of people still go out and drive at the limit of what the notes say without realizing that they need to cool it for a bit until their mental turning-ratio and entry-speed gauges get recalibrated. In words, on a blind event with organizer-supplied notes, you need to be in drive-what-you-see mode for a bit until you sync up with what the note-writers were doing - and many people don't do that. By being as consistent as possible across events, the Gibeaults try to ease that adaptation process.

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Self-righteous douche canoe

Er, and I feel I should point out to Grant that if you're not sliding the steering angle input is exactly the same whether you're going around a turn at 15mph or at 50mph...

Given the same car, and assuming you don't have some speed-sensitive drive-by-wire steering thing.

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Self-righteous douche canoe

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hoche
Er, and I feel I should point out to Grant that if you're not sliding the steering angle input is exactly the same whether you're going around a turn at 15mph or at 50mph...

Er, and I feel I should point out to Michel that your tires are always sliding (aka slipping). The steering angle input is not exactly the same whether you're going around a turn at 15mph or at 50mph...
Heard of slip angle?



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/01/2012 01:09AM by lukethedork.

From an article on Jalopnik: "Many amateur racers spend years discussing slip angles and cornering forces, thinking it makes them sound like really, really fast drivers. They proclaim daft statements like, "to truly perfect turn five you must determine the corner radius and lateral load produced, factoring in the desired 12 degrees of slip angle…" blah blah blah. What a load of horseshit."

Jalopnik.com

Hi Luke,

Glad you could join us.

Yes, yes, I have heard of slip angle. And I think you'll find if you review your math that until you're way up on the edge of traction, your slip angle is virtually nil. Enough that it can be discarded when it comes to talking about using steering wheel angles around turns.

On street tires, generally they'll start squealing when slip angle comes into play (which is, indirectly, what causes the squealing), but if you're below the squeal point, it's the same steering angle to navigate the turn regardless of the vehicle's speed.

If you really don't believe me, it's pretty simple to just go out and try it.

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Self-righteous douche canoe

Thanks Michel and everyone. I need to get the car finished so I can try this out! I want to compare some of the notes for idaho to what my preconceived notions of what a 3,4,5 etc should be.

So the whole steering ratio argument is only relevant if you are creating notes that are purely based around the degree you are turning the steering wheel. Since notes are personal construction it is up to the driver to determine what approach they want to use. I have written notes from scratch a couple of times and you can also play tricks on your self with your notes for example rather than using a cation on a complicated or dangerous turn you can just make the note a slightly tighter corner which should cause you to scrub the extra speed that you want without overly complicating the notes. But it is is really personal preference.

Examples:

Loeb's note describe the angle of the corner with a straight being a 180 and a right angle intersection being a 90

Hirvonen uses descriptive notes like medium, tight, hairpin, etc

McCrae used 1-6 where the number was how hard he could drive the corner 1 being slow way down, 6 being max attack so if you had a set of linked corners that in Jemba would be a "R2 and L2" he might call them a R2 and L6 since he would be going so slow coming out of the first 2 that he could fully attack the left.

As was correctly stated above by Morrison Chris's approach with marking the steering wheel is intended to drive consistency in the notes so he can trust that a 6 will be the same throughout the rally. Since he is a good driver it will likely only take him a couple of corners to recalibrate the necessary steering inputs to the race car steering and handling.

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Andrew_Frick
for example rather than using a cation on a complicated or dangerous turn you can just make the note a slightly tighter corner which should cause you to scrub the extra speed that you want

My first codriving experience the driver did alot of that. Not so much to replace cautions but just to keep himself in check. It's a very effective system and almost defines the difference between pace notes (above, McRae method) and stage notes (descriptive).
I don't recommend it to people who are planning to do more rallying on Jemba notes than rallies with recce just because it can get you into trouble. For example, a 3 was almost always a cautious 4 or dangerous 5 when I started. What would be a 3 in Jemba was almost always either coming out of something slow like a hairpin so would be a 4 or 5 or coming out of something really fast like a long straight so was downgraded to a 2. So I never really knew what a 3 actually was. I still think more in terms of pace for notes than describing the corner and felt like I gave up a ton of time during my one actual stage rally driving with notes due to that inability to connect note with what the corner would actually look like. Ironically I probably would have been faster at that rally without notes than with. Goes back to that whole thinking thing...

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Grant Hughes

Grant excellent point about changing notes styles being confusing. I know that the first couple of times I did 2 pass recce I had the jemba notes and just made subtle changes to them rather than starting from scratch. I found that recce in this way really helped solidify how Jemba works since I was able to think through how it constructs calls at a slow speed or actually stop on the stage if something was weird. And the first time I wrote notes from scratch I had jemba as well and used it as a crutch when I was not sure what numerical value to give the corner.

Since WRC events have not Jemba Chris' method is as good as any to get a number system that could match up better with Jemba and be more comfortable for him. If he tried to implement some completely different system it would likely slow him down similar to the experience you had.