- PET: short for Pre Event Test, which usually occurs a week before rally, where teams test their cars on terrain similar to rally stages.
- Recce: short for Reconnaissance, which means a period of time before the rally when competitors are allowed to drive through the stages in order to make their pace notes. During a recce, which is made with regular car, crews must not drive faster than 30-90km/h, depending on conditions. Any speeding will result in a fine and time penalty. Because of the slow speeds, driver must predict, how fast can he go without crashing out, when he’ll be driving at full speed later on.
- Parc Ferme: area where crews are required to park their cars overnight. No servicing is allowed there.
- Road Book: A set of instructions and route maps issued to each crew by rally organisers.
- Scrutineering: Pre-event, during or after event technical check. Pre-event scrutineering usually consist weighting a car, checking safety equipment and engine parts, if they all follow the rules. Some parts (gearboxes etc) are marked and sealed to prevent teams modifications during event. There can be also scrutineering during rally and there is always after event check, where technical scrutineers usually muster the cars of the top three finishers in the overall standings and also of the winners in each of the individual categories. If they uncover something that’s not above board, they will notify the rally stewards, who then make a decision regarding penalisation. In most cases, the driver is barred from winning points.
- Time card: The co-driver uses this little card to calculate their time of arrival at the next time control, and this time is confirmed on the time card by the marshals. At the end of a special stage, a time control marshal then adds the actual time to the card. This makes it possible to rectify any errors in the computer evaluation later on. The time card is incredibly important to the crew, because if you lose it, you can’t enter next stage.
- Shakedown: the last training session before actual stages, which gives crews opportunity to test their setting on terrain similar to rally stages. All crews must drive through shakedown at least three times and all times are measured.
- Hairpin: slow 180° turn, where drivers usually use handbrake
- Understeer and oversteer: Check out Richard Hammond simple explanation below.
- ALS (Anti-lag system): Technology in which fuel is burnt partially in exhaust manifold to keep turbo-charger blades spinning during non-acceleration to reduce turbo-lag and maintain constant power.
- DNF: acronym for “did not finish”
- DNS: acronym for “did not start”
