MN TELLS KRIS MEEKE WHERE TO GO

FROM THE CO-DRIVER’S SEAT

Co-driving. How hard can it be? If you can sit down you’re halfway there and if you can read, job done. That was what I told Paul Nagle after a glass of red wine the night before I replaced him in the seat alongside Kris Meeke.

The next morning I was, sort of, wishing I hadn’t been quite so bold; I’d got the sitting down bit sorted. It was just the reading I was struggling with. Seriously, I can read. And I thought I could read pacenotes. I’d done a half-decent job on the odd occasion I’d accompanied folk through the forest before – I’d even managed to get Stephane Peterhansel through a Dakar test. Admittedly, there hadn’t been any dunes – or even any junctions – but we didn’t get lost. Or crash.

I’m genuinely afraid both might be about to happen.

And now Nagle’s back. And he’s got a bit more to say.

I’ll shut the door. That’ll help. Hmm, strapped firmly into Citroen’s C3 WRC, I can’t even reach my own pocket, let alone the door. I’ll put my crash helmet on instead. Block him out that way.

“Watch these bits,” Nagle grins, leaning into the car and pointing to a couple of ‘fives’ in the notes. “You’ll be really moving there and it’s so important you get him slowed down for that slower corner coming up. Don’t forget to change your tone of voice. And speak clearly. But don’t shout.”

Shut. Up.

And now it’s coming from the other side too.

“Sorted?” says Meeke with a stern look on his face. “I need these notes, I haven’t been around here much and you know when you’ve got notes coming, as a driver, you follow them instinctively…” Seriously? “It’s true. Now come on, give me the first note.”

This really is happening. More than ever I’m regretting following up my appraisal of the work of a co-driver with a jovial recollection of the story about world champion drivers being accompanied by the ‘World Passenger Champion.’

Not even my mate Scott Martin found that one funny. No sense of humour some people. “Watch the clock,” Meeke tells me. What? You’ve just asked for the first note – which is it buster? One or the other, only got one pair of eyes on this side of the car…

“Three hundred, four-right tightens over crest,” I tell him. “Countdown!” Oops… Fortunately, KM’S noticed the clock ticking down, pulled first at 10 seconds and flicked us into ‘stage’ mode at three seconds. That reminded me. “Two, one, go!” Rubber digs dirt and drop-kicks us towards the horizon. Holy… “NOTES!” Crikey. Alright, Mr Shouty. “Three hundred right!” What? Was that me? Did I really say that? I did, didn’t I. “What?” Bugger. So far, you might have the impression that I haven’t taken the job of co-driving Meeke terribly seriously. Actually, I have. After the recce, I’ve watched the video and taken advice from Scotty and Paul; lots of it – once they forgave me for the whole Bordeaux-fuelled World Passenger thing.

They were both brilliant, even if it did get slightly complicated when I tried to read Scott’s Craig Breen notes. Both Breen and Meeke use a number system: one to six. Meeke follows the old Colin Mcrae plan of linking the speed-indicating number to gears; one is slow (first gear) and six is fast (sixth gear). Breen’s system is the complete opposite, six being a virtual hairpin.

I’m going through Scott’s notes and converting them. What can go wrong? Scott: “So that’s a six left there.” Six left. “Six? No, no, no, I meant one. It’s a one left.”

Repeat this three or four times and it’s remarkable how one person can find something so unamusing while, for others, it just gets funnier and funnier.

Where was I? Ah, yes, confusing 300 for three left. Or was it right? You get the gist of my problem. But I was genuinely confused. I’d read this thing about 10 times and could recite the first couple of pages of notes off by heart. Yet I’d fluffed the first line.

I had to pick this thing up. I offered a nervous laugh, apologised and gave Kris an affectionate, let’s-not-let-this-spoil-our-relationship kind of pat on the arm. That didn’t go well. He’d pulled fourth and we were hammering towards a long-ish right.

“What’s coming?” he shouted in a very much don’t-touch-me-again kind of way. That was it. I started reading. “Thirty one left opens into late hairpin right 30 one left short 80 two right minus 50 five right tightens…” My sentence was interrupted. “Slow down! You’re way ahead of me,” Meeke said.

My response probably wasn’t typical of his previous co-drivers. “Crack on then!” It was then that it dawned on me, this wasn’t going very well. In all honesty, it didn’t get much better. We did some skids, got back to the team and I got out. Slightly chastened.

Slightly? Chastened? I was humiliated. On the upside. I didn’t throw up. On the downside, Nagle was waiting for me.

I made a half-hearted attempt at being upbeat, but the look Meeke shot me told its own tale. Kris really was quite uncharitable about my efforts. I would have settled for the line which became something of an annual anthem to my school report: “He could do better.” It was nothing like as upbeat. Fortunately, I found a bowl of Haribo cola bottles and took solace in them.

Over an understandably lonely lunch, news is delivered. It’s good and bad. Turns out the video thing hasn’t videoed. That’s the good news: there’s now no record of my incompetence.

The bad news is they’re giving me

“You’ll be really moving in there”

another go. And this time they’re going to press the record button. Great. “Come on,” says Meeke with a grin, “what’s the worst that can happen?”

Seriously torn between some sort of prawn toast-type arrangement and the seat beside the Rally Spain winner… I go for both and clamber aboard, pacenote book in one hand, lunch in the other.

“This time,” he says, “don’t just blabber it all out. Feel what the car’s doing, call the next corner when we’re halfway down the straight. Think of being a corner and a half ahead.”

That’s fine, but what if we’re going really fast down a short straight? When then? And who counts time in corners? Or corners and a half ?

Enough. Enough with the nonsense. Let’s just get on with it. Startline. Deep breath. “Ten seconds.” Clunk. First. “Five…” Meeke flicks a switch and buries the throttle. We’re ready to launch. “Go!” And we’re gone. In all honesty, the launch isn’t too violent. In the time since my last attempt, Meeke has done a few more runs and the road’s started to cut up off the line. Sticky slicks on a baking Spanish startline would undoubtedly rearrange my insides. But initial wheelspin is countered by electronic French trickery and we’re soon picking up gears and speed at a staggering rate.

This time I’ve delivered line one at roughly the right time and in the right place.

“Three hundred, four-right tightens over crest.” Bingo. Looking at the note, I remembered Nagle’s advice about underlining (“Anything underlined needs to be read as one sentence…”). Oops. There’s a bit more to come.

Just as we’re heading into the four right, I repeat the call.

“Four-right tightens over crest for 100, tightens two-right at sign.”

By the time I’ve got that out, we’re halfway down the hundred and KM’S a touch too quick into the next corner. “Quicker!” he barks. This time I don’t panic. I call the next corner, but actually process what it means.

One left, short. That’s a first-gear corner. That means we’ll be going slowly. Silently, I look at the next line, which starts with 80 – that buys me a nanosecond. Deliver. Next one? Second gear corner, keep it steady. Hairpin, again, no need to gabble. Get through the corner, look up, check and talk.

It’s making sense. Now for the quicker stuff with some fourth and fifth-gear corners. Again, I just keep myself in check.

I’ve got it. Well actually, I haven’t. But I’m definitely less bad. I’ve started to understand that it’s about using all the senses; feeling the direction change through the seat, taking in the speed and looking up to find out where we are.

The stage slows again with: “One right and one left narrows under bridge.”

As we pass beneath the bridge, I decide to be even more helpful. “There’s the bridge!” Kris makes that funny noise again. The one that makes me think he’s not entirely committing to what I’m telling him.

We swirl into an intentional spin to take us back down the same road and he’s heard enough. He grabs a gear, then my book and throws it away.

I like to think he’s laughing with me at this point.

With nothing to do, I sit back and enjoy, helpfully pointing out Yves Matton standing on top of a hill.

Fortunately for Kris, even without my pacenote book, I’m able to deliver what I see as genuinely helpful information. “Don’t crash in front of Yves!” All too soon, we’re done. “That actually wasn’t too bad,” says Meeke. “Better than the first time. That time you were better than James May.” That’ll do for me. Once again I extricate myself from the car and go in search of Haribo, only to find Nagle and Martin waiting for me.

My respect for them has gone through the roof. I tell them about understanding the timing and delivery a bit more and Paul offers: “That’s fine, but wait until you get somewhere like Corsica…”

Scotty picks up: “… you just don’t stop talking. It’s corner, corner, corner all the time.”

Heaven forbid, what do you do if you lose your place?

Martin: “The first thing is not to panic. Let the driver know and he’ll start calling the notes to you, then you have to find your place very, very quickly.”

Being the best of the best, that doesn’t happen to these boys. But what does sometimes happen is when there’s been an incident in the stage, the odd occasion when they’ve had to deal with, oh, I don’t know, a trip into a car park at the end of a stage in Mexico…

Watch that bit back. Nagle doesn’t miss a beat when they’re back on the road. He’s straight back into the notes, right on cue.

What amazes me is the commitment from the co-drivers. After my recce with Kris, my four or five pages of notes were a real mess, that’s what comes from trying to write when your driver can’t keep the car still. Showing them to Scott, he asked me if I was going to rewrite them.

I gave him the look I reserve for my wife when she asks if I really need that extra roast potato.

He gave me the look my wife gives me when I eat the potato.

“You’ve got to rewrite them,” he says. “You can’t afford to not be able to read anything in the stage. It’s got to be completely clear. All the short hand and symbols we use, they become second nature. If you have to stop for a moment to think: ‘What does that say?’ or ‘What does that mean?’ You could be in real trouble. Co-driving is so instinctive.”

Yeah, yeah, I get all of that, and I’m totally committed to getting this right. But seriously? Re-writing all four pages?

“I rewrite every note we make on the recce,” he says. “I probably don’t need to, but I still do it all the time. Every note.”

Fine. Bloody fine. I’ll rewrite the sodding things.

He’s so right. Had I gone with the original notes, it would have been a disaster. OK, a total disaster.

I wasn’t perfect. Not even nearly, but for a couple of corners I got it right and that feeling was special.

But the highest praise came when I asked Kris for an honest comparison with Nagle.

“You were definitely better in one area,” he says. I genuinely hadn’t expected that. I felt like hugging him.

“When you say ‘three’ it doesn’t sound like ‘tree’.”

It’s fair to say my team-mates for the day found that funnier than I did.

So, with a handful of Haribo, I bade them farewell. ■