What is Rally Pacenote
In a rally car the driver does not see the road. He sees about a hundred metres of it, at speed, and everything beyond that comes from the co-driver reading a book of notes written days earlier at walking pace. Rally Pacenote gives you the book and takes away the wheel: you go through the stage corner by corner, decide what the car does at each one and how fast it arrives, and then you watch what you wrote.
Every corner has a right answer and the game does not hide it. A hairpin wants the handbrake, a tight corner wants a drift, a medium or slight bend wants the brake, a straight and a jump want the throttle. The hard part is the speed, because the speed a corner will take is not a property of the corner: it is the corner's own severity multiplied by the grip of the surface and by the grip of the car you chose. Tarmac gives everything, snow gives half. Arrive above what the corner will take and you run wide or you crash; arrive under it and you have simply given away time you will not get back.
How to play
- Pick a car, a country and a route, and the stage appears as a list of corners. Tap a line to open it, choose one of four actions — throttle, brake, handbrake, drift — and one of four speeds, and the list moves on to the next corner. On a computer Q, W, E and R choose the action, 1 to 4 the speed, the arrows move up and down the list and Enter launches. Nothing starts until every corner has both.
- Then you launch and watch. There is no steering and no rescue: the run is the plan you wrote, played out, with a stopwatch and a sector time for each corner. The button in the corner skips straight to the result if you have seen enough.
- Each corner comes back as perfect, good, slow or a crash. Perfect is the right action within a hair of the speed the corner will take; good is one of the two; slow is arriving well under it; a crash is arriving over it, and it costs two and a half seconds plus everything the car loses getting going again. Crash on more than three corners in five and the stage is marked failed — though the run still counts and still scores.
- The score is your time measured against the perfect run: a thousand points means you matched it exactly, and every second you gave away takes points off. Your best time for each route is kept on your own device, and the four cars are not skins — the tarmac car and the gravel car do not survive the same corner at the same speed.
Strategies that work
- The surface matters more than the car. Tarmac gives full grip, gravel three quarters, dirt about two thirds, snow half. The same medium bend that takes speed 4 at Monte Carlo takes speed 2 in Sweden, and no car makes up that difference.
- The wrong action does not always crash you — it costs you the tolerance. With the right action you have a margin either side of the ideal speed; with the wrong one that margin is what stands between you and the scenery. If you are unsure of the speed, at least get the action right.
- Stability is the forgiving stat, not grip. The boxy gravel car has the worst grip in the game and the widest tolerance, so it takes a speed you guessed roughly right and still comes out of the corner. It is the car to learn a new country in.
- Being slow is cheap and being fast is expensive, but only up to a point. One speed under costs you a fraction of a second; one speed over on a hairpin costs two and a half seconds and the exit. When a corner is close, round down.
- Straights and jumps are free points. They want the throttle and the highest speed you have, every time, on every surface — get those right without thinking and spend your attention on the hairpins.
A little history
Pacenotes were invented because rally stages are too long to memorise and too fast to read. The system in use today — a number for how open the corner is, a direction, a distance to the next one, and a word or two for what the road does under it — was worked out in the 1950s and 60s, and by the 1970s no serious crew went to a stage without having driven it at walking pace with a notebook first. What the co-driver reads out is not encouragement; it is arithmetic delivered at exactly the right moment, and a crew that trusts its own notes will carry speed into a corner neither of them can see. That trust is the whole subject of this game. You write the notes with all the time in the world, and then you find out what they were worth at ninety miles an hour.
Frequently asked questions
Why can I not steer?
Because the game is about the notes, not the driving. Everything is decided before the start line, exactly as a real crew decides it: the corner, the action, the speed. The run afterwards is the reading of what you wrote.
How do I know what speed a corner will take?
Multiply three things: how open the corner is, the grip of the surface and the grip of your car. A hairpin on snow in a low-grip car takes almost nothing; the same hairpin on tarmac in the tarmac car takes a good deal more. The game shows you the surface and the car's stats before you choose.
I crashed and still finished. Did it count?
Yes. A crash costs two and a half seconds and a great deal of speed, but the run continues. Only when you crash on more than three corners in five is the stage marked failed — and even then the time and the score stand.
Is the daily challenge the same for everyone?
Yes. The car, the country, the route and every corner of it come from the day's seed, so the whole world drives the same stage in the same car. The date changes at midnight UTC, not on your own clock.
