Is co-driving the worst job in motorsport? We find out

Have you ever learned another language? Those first couple of hours, as you try to grasp alien sentence structures and past participles, are head-scrambling.

The end of my morning lecture on pace notes won’t end in an innocuous role-play with the person sat beside me, though. Nope. I’ll be attempting to bellow directions at Dakar driver Nani Roma. In his competition Mini. On Dubai sand dunes…

Pace notes are just one of many vital skillsets possessed by a co-driver. It is, perhaps, the least enviable job in motorsport: you must guide you and your driver around blind bends and over tummy-pummelling jumps while being beaten senseless, all while you stare down at a piece of paper rather than out the window.

Your glory for getting it right isn’t always as great as the driver’s, while the chastisement for getting it wrong doesn’t bear thinking about. As I mull over the priceless Dakar car ominously parked outside the classroom I’m in, the consequences of complete ineptness is enough to make me focus until my brain hurts.

Pace notes themselves have been around as long as rallying itself, from about the turn of the 20th century. But route direction – and the importance of a co-driver – came to the fore during one particular race in 1955.

That’s the year the Mille Miglia was won not by the paciest car, but by its canniest driver. Or rather its canniest driving team. Sir Stirling Moss paired up with the late Denis Jenkinson – a journalist from Motorsport magazine – resulting in perhaps the most famous drive of them all.

Mille Miglia was traditionally contested alone, but you weren’t stopped from filling your passenger seat with someone willing to be hurled through Italian countryside at the thick end of 180mph.

“Many people would say, ‘Gosh, I’ll come with you,’” says Moss, “but that’s not what I wanted. I didn’t want a passenger. I wanted someone who could contribute as much as I was. And Jenks’s contribution to our success was as great as anything could be.”

What Jenkinson did was team up with Moss to work meticulously on pace notes, spending numerous weekends in the lead-up to the May ’55 race completing practice runs, making notes of corner types, surface imperfections, and what lay over eerily blind crests. Jenks’s notes could – and did – help Moss see through the scenery, as it were, cutting crucial seconds by staying flat-chat where unguided drivers would yield to caution.

“He was my guide dog,” Moss says. “If we hadn’t had the pace notes it would have taken it quite a bit longer.” They’ve been a stalwart of time trials and rallies since, relaying information even GPSs haven’t been able to replace.

I’ll be wearing an intercom-equipped helmet to pass my instructions on to Roma; back in the Fifties, there wasn’t technology able to shout louder than a Mercedes 300SLR, so Moss and Jenkinson instead used hand signals.

And this is where trust comes into it. Moss declares his friendship with Jenkinson strong, and that absolute trust in his instructions was easy. But for a driver to relinquish his decision-making to another requires tenacious trust in the person he’s sat beside.

“When he says flat-out, it needs to be flat-out,” Roma tells me. “It is hard sometimes for me – my past was competing Dakar on motorcycles, and now someone else is taking the decisions for me. But when you have a good co-pilot, you see the difference.”

Roma’s co-pilot for recent Dakars is Michel Périn, my lecturer. Given how pivotal it was to Moss and Jenks, I ask the pair of them how important friendship outside of the car is to the relationship inside of it. Given he can spend more time with his co-driver than his family, Roma declares it vital, while Périn is less convinced. “The main thing to have is confidence,” he says, a little coldly. Happily, Roma is one of the co-drivers he’s closer to from his career, so I don’t instigate a dispute there and then…

A stomach of steel is surely a given too, I contemplate, unsure how much I should actually be eating before clambering over into the high-rise Mini with Roma afterwards.

Some people are certainly more cut out for co-driving than others, with rather a lot of physical forces to contend with. “If you’re the driver, you’re in control, and this has protective actions,” says Professor John Golding, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Westminster. “You can anticipate what’s going to happen. Your body is less confused if it sees the horizon being thrown around in accordance with itself.

“The co-driver can’t anticipate so easily, at least in the short term, and they’re looking down, so they don’t have a horizon reference. And while they’re being thrown around, they’re doing close scanning, looking at maps. If you’re being moved and you’re trying to read, that makes motion sickness much worse.”

Motion sickness is something you can overcome, but only with resilience and gradually increased exposure to the job, allowing your body to acclimatise. How well you’ll cope is a mixture of genetics and past experience: the ability to stomach big, scary roller coasters isn’t a guarantee you’ll co-drive without being reintroduced to your dinner.

I skip dessert. It’s then that, in the 45°C heat of the desert, I climb into fire-retardant overalls and into the confines of the Mini. Luckily I don’t have to figure out the GPS system and seriously complex trip computers – a speciality of 600-mile-per-day endurance rallying – and instead focus on guiding Roma around a comparatively short course via my pace notes. I’ve been nervously walking up and down, reading back over them as if I’m rehearsing a best man’s speech five minutes before chinking the glass.

Now we’re off. All goes well until my directions take us over a humongous yump. Correctly, I might add, but it knocks me clean out of my seat and my eyes off the notepad. By the time we land, my eyes are 400m behind where the car actually is, and I stammer hurriedly through my notes to catch up. Until we career hard and fast towards a tight left turn, at which point Roma calmly asks, “What do I do here?”

“Erm, go round it,” I apologetically reply, a second or so after the steering lock has already been applied. As he makes the turn, I recalibrate with the pace notes, and we make it back to base without nose-diving down any perilously steep banks.

“When you were reading one, it was like, ‘Shit, it’s already the next one.’ You need to anticipate,” Roma tells me afterwards, “but it’s experience. On the motorcycle, I made those mistakes myself!”

It’s no shock. But it’s a stark introduction to the learning curve of co-driving.  You haven’t just got a new language to learn. You must do it while battling forces you can’t see nor brace yourself for, keeping pace with instructions that put the life of both yourself and your driver on the line.

Least enviable job in motorsport? I’m sure of it.