In short, you got instructions telling you where to turn by landmarks only, and importantly the distance between checkpoints that define a leg and the elapsed time you were to keep between those checkpoints. The winner was the team that had the closest time to what was on the sheet, sometimes only separated by tenths of a second.
The driver had the speedometer and odometer to measure speed and distance uncorrected and a second person, the navigator, had a board with a hackable clock and at least one good stopwatch, the instructions for the route, and either tables or what we called a Whiz Wheel to convert the car odometer error as an offset to real distance travelled, based on the first leg of the rally which was a known distance calibration leg. You drove that leg and received the "official" distance as used to create the route, and determined the offset of your devices from that official distance in order to mathematically calculate the correct distance throughout the rest of the legs of the event. Of course, everything now is electronic and GPS based, and a navigator can download an app to his phone to do all this magic. How wonderful for them.
We had no such things of course, so we had the afore mentioned timing gear, board, tables or a Stevens Rally Indicator (the Whiz Wheel), pencils and paper. Enter the really cool thing. There was this really beautiful mechanical calculator that several of the more affluent rallyists used to quickly get their calculations, something called a Curta "maths grenade".
I'll leave you to look it up on the 'net. You'll be fascinated. I admired them then and would love to have one today, though they are highly "collectable" and command stupid money. I still have most of my old timing gear and nav tools, rediscovered when we cleared my dads house to sell after his passing. Sometimes I get real close to hunting down a Curta to add to the array. I try to tell myself its the price of a new iPhone and way cooler!
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