All events in the British Rally Championship allow pacenotes to be used. The pacenotes are written during the "recce" which is usually a couple of days before the rally starts. Obviously pacenotes will not reflect any changes which occur between when the stage is recce'd and when it is run on the rally.

To overcome this, where possible we run a gravel note crew. They will drive over each stage an hour or so before we are due to arrive and are able to inform the team of any last-minute changes in conditions.

The use of gravel crews has filtered down from the World Championship (although they were banned in the WRC at the start of 2004 to reduce costs). The British Championship does not officially recognise the use of gravel crews. This means they cannot be used on the forest rounds of the championship which use private Forestry Commission tracks. However, the asphalt rounds are generally run on closed public roads, so there is nothing to prevent gravel crews driving the stages before they are closed to the public. This is fortunate because on asphalt there is much less margin for error which makes good "gravel notes" vital.

It is obviously important that the driver has full confidence in the gravel note crew. When they drive over the stages, the gravel crew will read back our pacenotes and add any additional notes relating to the conditions - typically short comments like "slippy", "water", "mud" or "gravel".

On some stages it may be necessary to add lots of information -

• Heavy Rain can make the road slippy or leave large puddles
• Tractors and Cattle can often bring fresh mud on to the stage
• If the stage has already been used once, gravel can accumulate on junctions

On other stages, there may be no changes at all - this information is just as useful as it means the stage is exactly as we recce'd it and there will be no unexpected surprises.

In addition, we often ask the gravel note crew to check things that may not have been clear during the recce, for example whether additional baricades have been erected to prevent cutting a corner.

Generally we use mobile phones to relay information back from the gravel crew - the distances tend to be too large for our 2-way radios to be effective. This can either be direct to the rally car during a service halt or to team management, who will pass on the information at a suitable point.

Information from the gravel crew will also be used to decide the best tyres to use for the next loops of stages. For this reason it is important that the gravel crew has completed that loops just before we arrive in the preceding service area.

In the British Championship, stages on the Ulster Rally often change significantly between the recce and the rally with fresh mud and gravel appearing. The stages on the Manx Rally change much less, but the weather can be very different from one side of the island to the other. In this case the gravel crew may act more like a "weather crew", so we can be confident in our tyre choice.