Two people have to agree what a four feels like first
Rally pace notes are numbers, not words, because a co-driver has almost no time to say one and a driver less to hear it — and the scale means nothing until two people fix it together.
A narrow column, spiral-bound. 200 R4. 100 L3 TIGHTENS. 50 CREST. 300 L5 DONT CUT, in red. 150 R2 LONG. 400 FLAT. 80 HAIRPIN R, set larger than the rest. 250 L4 OVER CREST.
Nothing on the page is a sentence. Somebody is going to read it out loud, at speed, in the dark. Unlike a lubrication chart pulled out and read at leisure, this one is never consulted — it's performed, once, and it has to be right the first time.
What is a pace note actually a record of?
The distance to the next corner, its direction, and how sharp it is — nothing else survives the format.
200 R4 means two hundred metres, then a right-hander of a severity of four. There's no adjective in it, no description of the road surface or the view, because none of that fits in the time a co-driver has to say it before the corner arrives. The note is stripped down to exactly the three facts a driver has to act on.
Why is the severity a number rather than a word?
Because a number is faster to say and impossible to hear as two different things.
"Fairly tight" and "quite tight" sound almost identical shouted over an engine at speed; a three and a four don't. The scale runs from a gentle flat-out corner at one end to a near-hairpin at the other, and a number on that scale is unambiguous in a way a word never quite manages to be under noise and vibration.
Why does the severity need agreeing in advance, corner by corner?
Because a four means nothing on its own — it means something once two people have driven the same scale together enough times to trust it.
A crew builds their own calibration over a season: this driver's four, on this car, feels a particular way, and the co-driver learns to write to that. Handed to a stranger, the same notes are just numbers on a page; read by the pair who wrote them, they're a corner the driver can already feel before the car gets there.
Why does DONT CUT need to be there at all
A four alone tells the driver how sharp the corner is, not what's waiting on the apex if they take the racing line through it. DONT CUT is the note for a corner that looks tighter to take wide and isn't — a ditch, a wall, ground that drops away — and it's in red because it overrides the shape of the corner rather than describing it.
Can real teams' or drivers' actual notes go on a shirt?
A specific crew's actual pace notes are theirs — written for one road, one car, one pairing, and licensable the ordinary way if a real event's set is the point. The severity scale and the shorthand it's written in belong to nobody; the notes themselves are the same kind of authored document a specific engine's torque figures are, printed in somebody's actual manual — usable in principle, not free to copy outright.
Isn't a private scale like this useless to anyone who wasn't in the car?
That's true, and it's also exactly what the format is for.
Pace notes were never meant to be read by anyone but the two people who agreed the scale — they're not a message to an audience, they're an instrument built for one specific pairing to use once and never again. A page nobody outside the car can decode isn't an oversight; it's the shortest, fastest version of the only conversation that actually needed to happen.
Does it print well?
Yes — dense shorthand and a single colour change reads cleanly at any size.
Keep the black text tight and the ruled lines faint, so the page doesn't fight the words for attention, and reserve red strictly for the calls that override the number beside them — DONT CUT and nothing else. The blue arrow works best kept small; it's a pointer, not artwork.
How do I get one made?
Describe your stage at JustOG — the distances, the corners, and which calls need marking in red. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.
Designs other people have published are in the shop.
Eighty metres to a hairpin, and somebody already knows exactly how it turns.