What is a Co-Driver?
[ April 18th, 2008 ] By: Charles Smith Posted in » Ramblings
Unlike most motorsports, in Rally Racing you have two people in the car. That second person in the car is called the Co-Driver, or sometimes the Navigator. They are not dead weight either, they serve an extremely important purpose: to tell the driver what is ahead. They will remind the driver of how fast to take the next corner and what the corner after that is, in order to setup for corners.
While a closed circuit where drivers drive countless laps of the same eleven corners may be memorizable, in Rally the cars might see the same corners twice (depending on how many times a stage is run). A single Rally stage could have a hundred corners, so memorizing them is out of the question. The Co-Driver will read notes to the driver, describing the corners and what to expect (Jumps, bumps, trees on the inside of the corner). In some rallies the notes are provided, in others the drivers and co-drivers will have a Recce, where they drive the stages at slow speeds and write down every bump, jump, corner and danger. The accuracy of the notes by the best co-drivers is so good that a good driver can drive solely off of the notes.
Of course, since reading notes and keeping your place in them is not hard enough already, the Co-Driver gets stuck with other tasks too. Some of these tasks include, pulling on levers as you enter a water crossing (Subarus on the SWRT), watching so many gauges an airline pilot wouldn’t know what to do, activate the wiper blades, be blamed if anything goes wrong, push the car out of anywhere it is stuck and of course dealing with the rally officials.
With all the stress a Co-Driver takes, they have to be a pretty relaxed person. They also have to be extremely organized with everything related to the car, because they tend to be the ones dealing with people not on the rally team. So next time you see a Co-Driver, thank them for everything they do (even if they’re not doing it for you).
April 20th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
Charles,
It occurs to me that with a GPS, a plot the map, and a text of instructions for the driver, that a little computer could read out instructions.
Why don’t they do that?
April 20th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Because tradition often turns into rules, and I think it is now a requirement in almost all rallies that you must have a Co-Driver. Plus they do more than just read instructions.