Rally terms, explained

The main form of the sport: closed roads, one car at a time, timed flat out, lowest total time wins.

Everything else on this page hangs off that. Roads are closed to the public, cars start at intervals rather than wheel to wheel, and the winner is whoever accumulates the least time across all the stages.

A rally run with no pace notes and no reconnaissance — the crew navigates from a roadbook and drives to what they can see.

Most Australian club rallies run blind. We have run Mitta, the Rally of the Heartland and Ada River this way. It is a genuinely different sport from a pacenoted event: you cannot commit to a corner you have not seen.

What a blind rally is actually like →

A short-format event, usually one closed circuit or a couple of short stages repeated, run in a single day.

Cheap, low-commitment and the usual way into the sport in Australia. The Victorian calendar carries several — the Presidents Rallysprint and Bagshot among them.

An event where the aim is to hold an exact average speed rather than go as fast as possible. Points are lost for being early or late at secret checkpoints.

Regularity runs alongside plenty of Australian rallies as its own classification — the Rally of the Bay includes the Shamrock Haulage RD Cup, and the Rally of the Heartland counts for the SA Regularity Series. The cars are often road-registered and the skill is precision, not speed.

Time-speed-distance rallying: navigating public roads to a route sheet at legal speeds, scored on arriving at checkpoints exactly on time.

The navigation is the sport. A TSD crew is solving distance and average-speed arithmetic on the move, and the winning margin is usually seconds accumulated over hours. Closer to the origins of rallying than anything with a helmet in it.

Low-speed events on a marked course in a paddock or on a dirt circuit, one or two cars at a time, run against the clock.

The cheapest way to start. Juniors can compete from 14 in Australian autocross, and plenty of national-level competitors began there.

Closed-road rallying on sealed surfaces, usually multi-day, often with a touring class alongside the competition.

Our 2025 Targa New Zealand win was in this format, and Betsy runs the Australian Tarmac Rally rounds. Speeds are far higher than gravel and the penalty for an error is correspondingly larger.

Long-distance, mostly off-road events over open terrain rather than defined roads, navigated by GPS waypoints.

A separate discipline with separate cars. The Sunraysia Safari is the Victorian example.

A single car climbing a closed road against the clock, usually a few kilometres, with each competitor getting several runs.

A short test stage before the rally proper where crews check the car and the notes.

Not scored. It is the last chance to find out that something is wrong while it is still cheap to fix.

A closed section of road where the rally is timed flat out. Stages are numbered SS1, SS2 and so on.

When you see "SS7" in a result sheet it simply means the seventh timed section of that event. The car with the lowest total across every stage wins.

The untimed public-road sections between special stages, driven at normal legal speeds.

You still have to arrive at time controls on time, so it is entirely possible to drive every stage brilliantly and lose the rally on liaison paperwork.

A short, usually two-car, purpose-built stage run somewhere the public can easily watch.

Built for spectacle rather than for time. Often held in a showground or a town centre on the Friday night of an event.

A stage abandoned mid-running, usually after an incident, weather or a blocked road.

Crews who did not get a clean run are normally given a notional time, which is why results sometimes show several cars with identical stage times.

A time awarded by the organisers when a crew is prevented from running a stage properly through no fault of their own.

At the Rally Barossa, nine crews including us were credited a notional 16:21.4 for SS8 after the stage was stopped.

A rise in the road that hides what is beyond it, and often unloads or launches the car.

The thing that makes pace notes worth having. A crest you can take flat and a crest that hides a hairpin look identical at 140 km/h.

Taking the inside line across the apex of a corner, usually onto the dirt or grass.

Fast, and how you find the rock or the ditch that ends your rally — which is why "don't cut" is one of the most important calls a co-driver makes.

Loose gravel swept off the racing line, piled on the outside of corners and at the edges.

Grooves worn into a soft surface by cars that have run earlier, which deepen through the day.

Running later in the field on a soft stage means a rougher, slower road — one of the reasons seeding matters.

A corner-by-corner script of the stage, read aloud by the co-driver a few seconds ahead of the car.

Each call grades the severity of the corner, gives the distance to the next one, and stacks on modifiers that matter. The driver commits to what is called rather than to what they can see.

How pace note calls are built →

The grade in a pace note call saying how hard a corner is. In our car a 1 is barely above a hairpin and a 6 is nearly flat, with a plus or minus on each number to nudge it either way.

Six numbers with a plus and a minus gives eighteen usable grades and only six words to learn. There is no universal scale — other systems run the numbers the other way, or use words instead — so the only thing that matters is that both people in the car read them the same way.

The full scale, with examples →

Driving the stages slowly before the rally, at legal speeds in a road car, to write or check pace notes.

Tightly regulated: limited passes, speed limits, and exclusion for breaking them. An ARC round has a recce; most club events do not.

The navigation document for a blind rally: tulip diagrams and cumulative distances that keep the crew on the right roads.

It tells you where to go, not how fast to take it. Reading one accurately at speed is a skill in its own right.

The little pictogram in a roadbook showing a junction, with a dot for where you enter and an arrow for where you leave.

Named after the Tulip Rally in the Netherlands, where the notation was first used. A roadbook is mostly a column of these against distances.

Reading tulips and roadbooks →

Pace notes supplied by the organiser or a commercial provider, rather than written by the crew on recce.

Common at Australian state level and the norm at events that ban reconnaissance. The co-driver's job becomes learning and marking up somebody else's notes rather than writing their own.

A precise distance meter used by the co-driver to match the roadbook to the road.

Calibration is everything. A trip reading one percent long will have you looking for a junction that is still 100 metres away.

A checkpoint where the crew must book in at an exact minute. Early or late both attract penalties.

The pre-event administrative check of licences, club membership and entry details.

The technical inspection that confirms the car and the crew's safety gear comply before the event starts.

It is not always at the rally. Marysville scrutineers on the Wednesday before, in Moorabbin — the other side of Melbourne.

The official document recording a competition car's identity, specification and scrutineering history.

Surrendered at scrutineering and collected back at the end. Turn up without it and you do not start.

The rulebook for one specific event: format, schedule, entry fees, eligibility and everything else.

Released weeks before an event and superseded by "Further Regulations" and bulletins as details firm up.

A secured area where cars are held and cannot be touched or worked on.

French for "closed park". Used at the finish so officials can check the car matches what was scrutineered.

The licence both crew members need to compete, issued in Australia by Motorsport Australia or AASA.

The two are not interchangeable. AASA covers the tarmac events; a Motorsport Australia permitted rally needs an MA licence and club membership.

Long-standing FIA categories: Group N for production cars with limited modification, Group A allowing considerably more.

Both are effectively historic categories now at world level, replaced by the R and Rally1–Rally5 ladder, but they remain the backbone of club and classic rallying in Australia.

The modern FIA ladder. Rally1 is the top World Rally Championship car; Rally2 (once R5) is the four-wheel-drive customer car most national championships are won in.

Age-based categories for older cars, split by period. P5 covers the era our 1995 Impreza wagon runs in.

Classic fields are where a lot of Australian club rallying actually lives, and the cars are often more interesting than the modern ones.

The welded steel structure inside the car that protects the crew in a roll or an impact.

Built to a published standard, certified, and the single most consequential thing in the car. FIA Article 253 is the specification most international paperwork refers to.

A steel or composite plate under the engine protecting the sump and gearbox from rocks.

Our wagon has a dented floor pan courtesy of two rocks at Mitta, which is the argument for a good one.

Auxiliary lighting fitted for night stages, either a bar across the front or a pod of spotlights on the bonnet.

Usually removable, because the drag and the weight are not worth carrying in daylight.

The tracking, timing and safety unit fitted to every car at most Australian events.

It handles live timing, tells you if a faster car is catching you, and — the part that matters — calls for help automatically in an impact. Hired from the organiser as part of the entry rather than bought.

A double-sided board carried in every car: green OK to show a following crew you need no help, red SOS if you do.

If you pass a stopped car showing nothing at all, you are required to stop. That is the rule that makes the whole system work.

The second crew member, who navigates, reads pace notes, manages time controls and runs the paperwork.

On a blind rally they are reading a roadbook; on a pacenoted one they are delivering a script at exactly the right moment. Either way the driver is largely following instructions.

Official cars that run the stage ahead of the field to check it is clear, safe and properly marshalled.

Numbered by how far ahead they run. The 0 car is the last through before competition starts, and often driven quickly by an experienced crew.

Two different things: the official car that follows the field to confirm everyone is out, and the disadvantage of running first on a loose stage.

The second meaning is the one drivers complain about. The first car through a gravel stage sweeps the loose surface aside for everyone behind, and loses time doing it.

The team who work on the car in the service park, within a fixed time window.

Entries usually include a set number of service crew nominations. Servicing anywhere outside the designated area is typically banned outright.

The volunteers who run road closures, control points and spectator areas. Without them there is no rally.

Many Victorian events require every entered crew to nominate someone for marshalling duty at another event in the year.

The order cars start in, set by the organisers on past results and expected pace rather than by entry date.

It also explains rally car numbers: they are usually assigned by seeding, so a low number means the organisers expect you to be quick, not that you entered first.

Outright is your position against the entire field. Class is your position among comparable cars.

A privateer in a classic car can finish 15th outright and win their class on the same day, and the class result is usually the meaningful one.

A block of stages scored separately for championship points, so one rally can award points more than once.

The Marysville Stages splits into two heats. It changes strategy: a bad first heat is survivable in a way a bad single-score rally is not.

Did Not Finish and Did Not Start. DNF is the one that hurts.

A rule allowing a crew who retired to restart the next day, carrying a time penalty for the stages they missed.

It exists so a broken car on day one does not end a spectator's weekend or a competitor's event.

Time added for arriving at a control early or late, separate from your stage times.

It is why a derived result calculated purely from stage times sometimes differs from the official classification.

Results are provisional until the protest window closes, then become final.

Marysville publishes provisional results on the Wednesday after and they go final the following Saturday evening.

The Australian Rally Championship — the national series, six rounds across six states.

Each state runs its own championship: NSWRC in New South Wales, VRC in Victoria, SARC in South Australia, QRC in Queensland.

A single rally commonly counts for several at once. Narooma scored for the ARC, the NSWRC, the NSW Clubman series and the ACT series simultaneously.

The AMSAG Southern Cross Rally Series, a long-running east-coast club series.

The East Coast Classic Rally Series, for older cars, run across state borders with separate 2WD and 4WD titles.

Entry-level championships running alongside the state series for less experienced crews and less modified cars.

The two Australian sanctioning bodies. Motorsport Australia is the FIA-recognised national authority; AASA sanctions many tarmac events.

Which one permits an event decides which licence you need, which rulebook applies and which insurance covers you.