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Aeurias's avatar
Aeurias
2 years ago

Co-Driver "Slight" pacenotes verbose & reading haste, anticipation and severity

The issues:

The "Slight" Left/Right calls are severly overused and mask over important call outs.

Such as: "Slight left over crest..." in a slow monotone pace, and as you came over the top it would then call out "sudden hairpin left" in the same monotone pace, and you enter it at full speed redline in 5th gear... The important note is called too late, even on the earliest co-driver setting because it took too long to read out the slight call.

The co-driver does not speed up the note reading, such as reading hastly for fast sections when you are traveling at higher speed ether. Think of the brilliant Paul Nagle, how he speeds up his notes on quickly approaching and sudden high speed into very slow sections of the stages.

Co-driver also doesn't tell you how the stage starts like in DR 2.0, so you go flat out of the line into a ditch as the co-driver can't keep up with the player: "Starts L5 & R6 into hairpin left".


What should be done instead:

Use R/L 6 or 7 instead as they are shorter for the co-driver to say and quicker to hear, or no slight pacenote calls at all, as small adjustments of the trajectory or insignificant kinks are not necessary calls and hide out more severe and important calls.

("slight" doesn't belong in numeric pacenotes and should be a "Flat 6/7 L/R" or "Flat L/R").

Important!: Call anticipation speed/time so that it is proportional to the speed of the car. So example: call is done 0.5 second sooner for a speed of 50km/h and 1 second sooner for a speed of 100 Km/h etc.

Notes for a corner are called at the middle or end of the previous corner atm. They should be called at the beginning of the previous corner then adjusted with the early/late setting:

Next corner call = beginning of previous corner +
-0.5s on Earliest
-0.25s on Early
-0s on Normal (at beginning of previous corner)
+0.25s Late

+0.5s Latest etc.

The start of a stage should be called just how Dirt Rally 2.0 does this is important for the quicker cars.


Additional, not important request:

Repeat button: If you miss a note, ask co-driver to repeat it using one of the buttons of your wheel
Angular format: The severity is expressed as a number measuring the turn angle where 90 means right-angled and 180 means flat.
Example: "100 L4+" will be "one hundred meters, left one hundred and thirty."
This is the system used by Loeb/Elena and other French teams. It sounds verbose in English, but is much more compact in French "cents mètres, gauche cent trente".


There's a lot more information going out than simply "Four right" or "Three left". Real callouts reference landmarks also, to help memory and remember what's coming next. They also improvise on the fly by telling the driver to slow down, or let the driver know that they are taking significant risks. A co-driver with personality is essential. It's not just shooting off pacenotes, they are also building trust and making sure what they say is understandable. The co-driver is the rational brain and the driver is the physical brain. Pacenote style exist in all kinds of shapes, dialects as well as levels of complexity, using a dull expressionless co-driver with no variance, stress levels and severity is not the way to go.

bug

2 Replies

  • JG-skinny-racer's avatar
    JG-skinny-racer
    2 years ago
    @Aeurias Agree with most of what you're saying especially the time based trigger (an extension, how many corners in advance you would prefer - for example always 2 corners in advance). However the angle in degrees i really wouldn't be interested in
  • Tekel_IV's avatar
    Tekel_IV
    2 years ago

    I agree that the reading should speed up to avoid falling behind.  I dont want to lose the slight turn callouts as I find them very useful. 

    I find usually the notes will say slow or brake before saying slight left into hairpin right.  So most of the time its fine as I know I need to slow down for whats coming next.

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