Pace notes
Why no two crews call it the same way
People assume rally notes are standardised. They are not, and it is not close. As Jemba — who produce the official notes for several national championships — put it on their own comparison page: “there is no world wide standard set for safety-, route-, stage or pace-notes. Not even the name of them has got a standard.”
Four systems, same corner
All four of these describe a road perfectly well. They just disagree about how many grades you need, whether to use numbers at all, and even which order to say things in.
Ours
What we runWhat we call in the car, and what you hear on the onboard channel.
- Scale
- 1 to 6, numeric
- Word order
- Grade first, then direction — "4 right"
- Plus / minus
- Yes. A plus is faster than the bare number, a minus tighter.
- Worth knowing
- Six grades with a plus and a minus gives eighteen, out of six words to learn.
United States national
The standard for US national championship stage notes.
- Scale
- 1 to 6, numeric, with a parallel descriptive set (Hairpin, Bad, Kay, Medium, Easy, Flat)
- Word order
- Direction FIRST for numeric — "L6" — but AFTER for descriptive, "FL"
- Plus / minus
- Yes, and explicitly: a plus is a slightly faster corner, a minus a slightly slower one.
- Worth knowing
- The notes themselves warn that only skilled crews should read the plus and minus, and advise everyone else to ignore them.
New Zealand national
The single official system for New Zealand stage notes.
- Scale
- 1 to 8, numeric, with a parallel descriptive set (Tight hairpin up to Absolute)
- Word order
- Grade first, then direction — "6R"
- Plus / minus
- Yes, on the middle grades.
- Worth knowing
- Eight grades rather than six, so the fast end gets more resolution — Flat, Easy and Absolute are separate things rather than shades of one.
British Championship
Notes sold for British Championship events.
- Scale
- No numbers at all — Acute, Hairpin, Square, Kay, Medium, Fast Mid, Fast, Easy, and just a direction for the fastest
- Word order
- Grade first, then direction — "FL"
- Plus / minus
- No. "Open" is added instead when a corner is faster than its grade suggests.
- Worth knowing
- Distances in yards, even numbers up to 100 and odd numbers above it.
Three ways this bites
The numbers can run either way. Ours and the US system both go low-is-tight, high-is-fast. Plenty of drivers use the exact opposite, and the US notes themselves acknowledge it. A 5 is either nearly flat or nearly a hairpin depending on whose notes you are holding.
The same mark means different things. In the New Zealand system a single “!” is a wake-up, with two for caution and three for danger. In the British system one “!” already is the caution. Read a New Zealand note with British instincts and you will brake for nothing all stage — which is its own kind of dangerous, because you stop believing the marks.
Even the word order moves. The US numeric system puts direction first — L6 — while its own descriptive version puts it last, and New Zealand and Britain both put the grade first. It sounds trivial until a co-driver is reading at eighty miles an hour and their mouth is running ahead of their eyes.
Where the official notes come from
At events that supply notes rather than letting crews write their own, they are often generated rather than driven. Jemba’s inertia system puts a sensor box on the floor of an ordinary road car, drives the stage at normal speed, and derives the grades from the physics — accelerations, distances, speed — instead of from somebody’s judgement. A second operator keys in the things physics cannot see: junctions, bridges, gates, the rock on the inside.
The point of it is consistency. A 4 on stage one is the same radius as a 4 on stage ten, which is not guaranteed when a tired human grades a hundred corners in an afternoon. The same software prints the result into whatever house style the championship wants, which is exactly why the notation differs country to country while the underlying measurement does not.
The only rule that actually matters
Not which system is best — the two people in the car reading it the same way. That is why a co-driver handed a set of organiser’s notes spends the week before an event learning them rather than just reading them, and why crews who have worked together for years are reluctant to change anything at all.
Compared against the published official abbreviation sets for the United States, New Zealand and British championships, collected by Jemba, and their description of the inertia notes system. Checked 23 September 2026.