16/09/2009
New safety symbols for spectator areas at the RallyRACC


Chris Atkinson (Subaru). RallyRACC 2008 

As a new contribution of the RACC to the complex organizational questions of all rounds of the FIA World Rally Championship, the 45 RallyRACC Catalunya-COSTA DAURADA, Rally de España (October 1st to 4th), will be using a new safety symbol and interpretation system in the spectator areas of special stages for the first time, which entails a change of philosophy, looking for the involvement of spectators but also aiming to take utmost care of the environmental and visual impact on the safety areas.

The new philosophy used in this project intends to be extremely simple. In all those areas declared as spectator areas, spectators may access any non signposted area or stay behind the yellow-and-black coloured fence whenever used to delimit an area.  The aim is to reduce the use of delimiting fence as much as possible and mark only those areas in which spectators must stay behind a certain point.

All those areas considered by the organization as dangerous and therefore as no-go areas will be signposted with a series of red signs (new signs for 2009) in two languages -Spanish and English-, indicating the clear prohibition together with red coloured tape.

Ramon Corominas, Race Secretary of the RallyRACC confirms that the organiser “wants to go back to a simple way to control safety, having the behaviour of spectators as main ally. Thus, we will be able to reduce the environmental and visual impact to a minimum, which will consequently improve the quality of the rally in all levels”. This new approach, clear but simple, will consequently allow for a quicker set-up and dismantling of the stages and less efforts in order to clean the terrain after the race.

With this new measure, the RACC continues making new proposals with the main aim of improving the series and at the same time reducing the costs of the WRC.  The previous proposal, which was accepted by the WRC Commission with immediate effect (it was introduced in Rally Portugal) was the creation of new Time Cards for participants, simplifying the structure of the document to a large extent and making it much more simple and cheaper to produce, with a spectacular cost reduction ratio of 50 to 1, and the support of the computerised control systems which are already available at all races.

The RACC, pioneering club and constant innovator in the world of rallying, introduced at the 2008 RallyRACC the so-called virtual notice board, which means nothing else but uploading all documents of interest for the participants to the Internet (www.rallyracc.com) immediately after publication. This service complements in a much faster way the function of the classic physical notice board.

Likewise, the RACC proposed back in 2000 a timing system that was the embryo of the current timing system provided by ISC to all WRC events and that the RACC still uses during its world championship event, so that it is virtually impossible to have a mistake or laps in the system.

RACC Press


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