why in rally races there is a guy on a passenger seat explaining where to drive?
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Driving those courses is seriously intense; having a second person warn you what’s coming up is extremely helpful and allows the driver to focus on white-knuckle driving. They don’t memorize every detail of every track either which is why the passenger has a map
Rally racing is very different from circuit racing. Instead of short laps around a fixed track, they are longer point-to-point stages, with routes that can vary season to season.
Track racers can get several hours in which to make practice laps, not to mention time on a simulator with an accurate track model, and they may even have raced the same track with minimal or no changes many times before. They can therefore become very familiar with the layout.
In rally, on the other hand, the driver gets maybe one or two reconnaissance runs where they can drive the course at road legal speeds – this is the time during which the co-driver makes the notes they’ll then read from during the flying run.
Because this will be (usually) 2nd time the route has been driven by the driver after a single recon and the stage will consist of *many* unique corners.
It would be impossible to memorise like you do a circuit so the navigator is doing just that: Telling the driver what is coming up and (based on their own notes from recon), how to to drive each part of the course.
Codriver does more than just read the pacenotes during the “special stages” – it’s their job to navigate throughout the rally on normal roads to the start point of each special stage where there are checkpoints that the car must arrive at within a certain time window, if the car is late or early then time penalties are added. He is also reaponsible for managing the time-card which keeps track of the car’s time throughout the rally.
Good summary of the co-driver’s responsibilities [here](https://www.autoevolution.com/news/the-role-of-a-co-driver-in-a-rally-car-explained-183242.html)
Have you ever driven through mountainous roads?
When there’s a turn ahead, and thepuntain blocks your view, you’re not sure if a turn is going to be a slight turn or a hard turn. So to drive safely, you slow down.
The passenger is just a navigator so the driver can focus on driving fast instead of driving and paying attention to the next curvatures. The passenger will tell them “slight right” so the driver can maintain their high speed, or “hard right” at which the driver will slow down so their car doesn’t spin out when making the sharp turn. (Pretty sure the passenger uses more words, but that’s the simple explanation).
The driver can drive without the passenger, but going at high speed requires a huge amount of focus. The additional weight of a passenger is more valuable as a navigator, than driving solo with less weight.
Rally races are an entirely different race than a normal track race like F1 or NASCAR. I mean, NASCAR is mostly just an oval-ish track with nothing but left turns.
F1 tracks have left and right turns to them, but the route of the track is easy enough for a single driver to study and memorize on their own.
Rally tracks can vary in their terrain and elevation over a much longer distance than other tracks. The A driver is literally guiding the driver through it by telling them what angle to approach a turn, what speed to approach it at, how sharp the turn is, etc etc. There are dozens, if not hundreds of variables that need to be taken into consideration. This allows the driver to strictly focus on driving while the A driver acts more as a navigator and co-pilot.
For anyone who’s never seen it here’s the pace some co-drivers have to operate at.. try to keep up.. https://youtu.be/jpDSPhECTSA?si=svyQGqVhMEK9vdZE
he’s the gps. tells driver if he should speed up or slow down because of a sharp corner. also has map of track in hand.
For circuit racing, drivers get a detailed map of the track, they can review footage, they get test/practice/qualifying runs, they can even run laps in a simulator, before running dozens or even hundreds of laps in the actual race. It’s easy to memorize every little detail, especially when you’re racing the same track year after year.
For rally racing, there are no laps, it’s point-to-point “stages”. There is no practice, and the course changes (sometimes entirely) from year to year. They generally only get two reconnaissance (“recce”) drives through the course, in a regular passenger car, at normal road speeds. It’s impossible to memorize the entire course, let alone every little detail (like a rock in the apex, a dip, a ditch, a blind corner, etc).
On race day, they get to make their one and only run through each stage in a race car.
Those notes the navigator is reading are created on those recce trips, and read to the driver to let them know what is coming up. That allows them to push the limits and go as fast as possible.
I always kinda pictured it like if the car was an organism, the driver is the reflexes and instincts, and the nav is the executive functions.
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