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How to read a roadbook

A rally-raid roadbook is a list of instructions in the order you will meet them, each one tied to a distance. You find your way by knowing how far you have come since the last instruction, and what the next one tells you to look for.

The layout and codes below follow the FIA cross-country rally regulations. The FIM uses the same system for bikes, and because the vocabulary started out in French, crews in every country use the same codes.

One line, three boxes

Each line of the roadbook is divided into three boxes, read from left to right.

• Distance. The total distance from the start of the selective section to this point, and the partial distance since the previous line. If there is a waypoint here, its symbol and number are in this box too.
• Tulip. A drawing of what you will find at that distance. A junction is drawn as a dot where you arrive, with a thin line for each track leaving it and a thick arrow on the one to take. In English it is called a tulip, or ball and arrow. The name comes from the Tulip Rally (Tulpenrallye) in the Netherlands, where this kind of diagram was first used in the 1950s. French crews call it the boule-flèche. Danger marks go in this box, and so does the compass heading when one is given.
• Description. What comes after that point: speed limits, further headings and notes about the terrain.

Headings

A heading is written as a number of degrees, often marked CAP, the French word for heading. Roadbooks only give one where you need it: at complicated junctions, on faint tracks and across open ground with no track at all. In the dunes the heading is often the most useful thing on the line. In the example, the headings are the numbers in yellow boxes.

Reading the example

1. Line 1 is the start of the selective section (DSS). Both distances are zero, and the tulip sends you straight on along a sandy track.
2. At 2.35 km the track forks. The arrow is on the right-hand branch, and the heading to take is 080.
3. After another 3.55 km, at 5.90 km in total, comes masked waypoint 1 (WPM). The route leaves the track here, which is why the arrow is dashed, and you steer on 112 into open dunes. The GPS only starts guiding you within 800 metres of a masked waypoint, and you have to pass within 90 metres of it.
4. Line 4 is framed in red because it carries a level 3 danger: a deep hole across the track at 7.42 km. A level 3 danger always comes with a safety waypoint, here WPS 2, and its 30 metre radius keeps you on the safe line past the hole.
5. At 9.10 km a speed zone starts (DZ) through a village, limited to 50 km/h until the FZ line that ends it.

Working through the roadbook

Reset the partial at each line, then drive, watching it count up towards the distance on the next line. When it gets there, the junction or landmark in the tulip should be in front of you and your heading should match. If you reach the distance and the ground does not match the drawing, stop and work out where it went wrong. The mistake is usually further back than it feels.

Crews go through this loop hundreds of times a day, so everything depends on the distance being right.

Waypoints

At FIA and FIM events the organiser's GPS unit validates waypoints as you pass them. The type of waypoint decides when the unit starts guiding you to it, and how close you have to get for it to count. These figures are from the 2026 FIA regulations, and the FIM uses the same radii.

The WPN is the wide one, used in open terrain such as dunes, and missing one is expensive: under the FIA rules it costs four times the penalty of the other navigation waypoints. The WPP is only used on tracks, and it appears in the waypoint list rather than in the roadbook itself.

A masked waypoint with a 90 metre radius in a dune field asks a lot more of a navigator than a visible one at 200 metres on a clear track, so it pays to know which type is coming.

Other codes

Dangers are graded !, !! and !!!, from level 1 to level 3, and printed in red. Under the FIA rules a level 3 danger always comes with a safety waypoint (WPS), and the organiser is asked to frame the whole line in red so that nobody skims past it.