How to make a rally roadbook

A roadbook is the one document a whole field of crews will trust for a day — sometimes a week. Here's the whole job, in order, in plain English.

Every roadbook, from a club evening run to a week-long tour, is the same thing underneath: one row per instruction. Each row carries a little junction drawing — the tulip — plus two distances and a few words. Read top to bottom, the rows carry a crew from the start to the finish without a map. Making one well is mostly a matter of doing seven jobs in the right order.

1. Get the route exact first

The book inherits every mistake the route has, so the line comes first and the drawing second. Either plan it on the map — tracing roads until the shape is right — or drive it and record it, which is better still, because the recording is the truth of what's actually there. Don't start drawing tulips until the line is the line: every edit to the route afterwards means re-checking distances and diagrams downstream of the change.

2. Choose the instructions

Not every junction goes in the book. What goes in is every place a stranger could go wrong — plus the places you need them to do something: section starts and finishes, controls, cautions, "straight over" confirmations on long empty stretches so nobody's left wondering. A useful test: imagine a careful crew who've never seen these roads. Anywhere they'd hesitate, that's a row.

3. Draw the tulips

One diagram per row: the ball is the road you arrive on, the arrow is the road you leave by, and the other lines are what you'll see through the windscreen — enough to be sure you're at the right junction, and nothing more. Keep them simple; a tulip with every farm track drawn in is harder to read at speed than one with three clean lines. (New to the notation? Start with what is a tulip diagram?)

4. Measure the distances

Each row usually carries two numbers: the total distance from the start of the section, and the intermediate — the gap since the last instruction. Crews drive on the intermediate: they zero the trip at each instruction and count down to the next. That's why the numbers must come off the actual route line, not off a ruler or a guess — a roadbook that's 200 metres optimistic at every junction has a whole field second-guessing it by lunchtime.

5. Add the words and the signs

Few words, useful words. Signpost confirmations ("SP Melton"), the thing that makes the junction unmistakable ("at the phone box"), and honest warnings ("care — gravel", "narrow bridge"). Where what the crew will actually see is a road sign — a give way, a stop — put the sign itself in the row. The words are there for the navigator to read aloud in half a second, so write them the way they'll be spoken.

6. Check it — properly

The classic roadbook error is a junction drawn from the wrong approach — the diagram is true of the junction but mirror-imaged for the direction you meet it. The best check is mechanical: compare every tulip against the recorded GPS track and make sure the turn the diagram shows is the turn the line takes. Then the gold standard: give the book to someone who wasn't involved and have them drive it cold. Everywhere they hesitate, the book needs a row or a word — the fix is never "they should have known".

7. Print it like it'll be used

A roadbook lives on a navigator's lap, in a plastic wallet, sometimes in the rain, often photocopied. So: black line-work on white that survives a photocopier, a size that suits the car (A5 is the classic), page numbers, and a cover that says what event it is, the date, and the total distance. If the book might be reprinted by someone else, assume the worst printer in the county and design for that.