I hope you are wearing your asbestos shorts, because this is a hot topic.
As of Friday, I am a believer in notes and nothing else.
The notes for LSPR were $150 ... on top of a $550 club entry fee. That defrays the cost of making them, which is not small. It's done by an automated system that uses accelerometers, gps, and god knows what else to produce the first draft. Then they are tweaked by real rally drivers.
Expensive equipment and a very time consuming process, but intended to be very consistent from rally to rally. It also makes it difficult for club-only rallies to afford and for low-budget teams in pro rallies. (CARS, by the way, makes notes available for a lot less money. There, now I'll shove a stick in that hornet's nest, too.)
They are safer and eventually will replace tulip notes completely, I bet, but not instantly. There will be, of course, a rear guard of traditionalists to argue against this.
As I mentioned on the web page, we chose not to use notes because a beginner needs to learn a few basic skills before devoting the kind of co-driver bandwidth that notes require. In other words, certain co-driver actions need to be pretty automatic so they can be done in conjunction with notes - arrival calculations and working the odometer, for example.
The beginner alternative would be to use the notes and slow down, but what fun is that?
