To you, the junction at the end of the road may be a ‘square right’. To the next person, it could be a ’90 right’. To someone else, as Max McRae jokes, it could be ‘sausage right’.
This is the language a rally driver and co-driver must learn together. So long as they’re both fluent, it doesn’t matter if you or I understand it or not.
After all, it’s these details that make the difference. Any driver worth their salt can drive a rally car quickly, but ironing out the creases and finding the tenths is the difference between success and failure.
“I think I’m a very natural driver because of go-karting and circuit racing and stuff like that. I think any car I get into, I can slide it about or drive it quite fast,” McRae says, appearing on DirtFish’s podcast SPIN, The Rally Pod.
“But it’s the same thing in rallying: you need the experience to learn the pacenote system, which is always evolving.”
McRae – who’ll fight for the British Rally Championship title this year in a Škoda Fabia RS Rally2 – uses a system many from his generation do, thanks to a childhood spent playing Colin McRae Rally games: corners graded one to six, with six fastest.
But he and co-driver Cameron Fair “are always changing stuff” in order to improve. Bravely, he selected his final round of 2025 – the Cambrian Rally – to revolutionize his pacenote system; brave because it was also his first event in Škoda’s latest-spec Rally2 model.
However it worked: McRae won the event, his first in the BRC, and looks to keep refining that new system into 2026.
“After Rali Ceredigion last year, which was just not a good weekend, we had to have a bit of a rethink about pacenotes. Going from the Rally4 car into the Rally2, it just became a bit too complex. I just wasn’t taking in the information.
“So we almost went back more towards Colin’s note system where it’s more simple. I’m not really adding flat or stuff like that, it’s just plus or minus, which is probably what I should have done before, but you can get so carried away with adding information sometimes.”
Letters and symbols in a notebook really are crucial in rallying
As the saying goes, it’s different strokes for different folks. What works for McRae doesn’t necessarily work for Elfyn Evans or anyone else. The important thing for each and every rally driver is to first describe the road accurately, and then note that into a system that is digestible at speed.
McRae: “Last year I was using plus and minus on the angle of the corner, whereas now it’s for my speed. It’s just about consistency with all the angles and last year I just didn’t have that consistency, which in the Rally4 car was OK because the speed was much lower and you could get away with stuff a bit more. But in the Rally2 car when you’re flat out, you pretty much have to commit to the car and the line to be on pace.
“So if there was a little kind of misjudgment or there was too much of a difference between a four minus and a four plus, then it was just… I wasn’t committing to the pacenotes and I was being too tentative. It wouldn’t be until the second pass where we changed the notes in service and then I’d be on the pace. But by the time we got there, it was a bit late anyway.
“It’s not a big difference in pace really but I can be more comfortable. It’s unlocked more potential to be even quicker, especially when I get used to the refined system.”
Experience naturally helps in this process: learning stages, the car, driving habits and what ultimately works (or doesn’t). But having the confidence of knowing that the pacenotes are as good as they’re ever going to be removes an element of doubt, freeing the driver’s mind as they line up to attack the stage.
“It is pretty interesting,” says McRae. “Some people might watch Rally TV and be like ‘I have no idea what they’re saying’. It’s a bit of an art and we almost create our own language to drive a car fast.
“There’s no other sport in the world that does that.”
You can listen to the full interview with McRae now, where he discusses his childhood growing up as part of a famous family, his 2026 ambitions and the opportunity that lies ahead for him with the WRC coming to Scotland.
