Thank you, Nick Another RwGPS aficionado here. I, like many others (judging from the leg sheets discarded at many LEL controls), appreciated and used (sometimes) your quartered A4 routesheets for LEL.
"At the end of the day, the arrows define the route, NOT the GPX files." Do the arrows authoritatively {source needed} define the mandatory route?
Does ACP produce routesheets of any sort?
So follow the arrows till they (one thinks they've) run out and then navigate back to the gpx track is the motto, then?
I did the same style routesheet for PBP2015, and I'm hoping to do so again for PBP2019
ACP does produce a routesheet, but it's in the French style, which is quite different to the more usual style in the UK and I found it lacked the turn-by-turn detail, which is why I bothered to create an alternative in the first place. The French style seems to be "go to this town and take this road [EDIT] with this D-number, go to that town and take that road [EDIT] with that D-number", which works well in France, where signage is generally very good [EDIT] and most of the roads are numbered, but there's no corroborating guidance, and generally the actual streets used through the town aren't mentioned, so the assumption appears to be "follow your nose through town". Since PBP is a mandatory route, I felt something with a bit more detail would be useful ... and over-planning is a thing
The arrows are EVERYWHERE. It certainly helps, though, to know how far to the next turn by following progress on a routesheet, or having a pink line to follow. Somewhere in the Rulez will be a note about the normative route indication, and I'm pretty sure we will be told at some point that it's the arrows, everything else being informative. You DON'T need a GPS or routesheet to ride PBP, it's just a belt-and-braces thing, and some riders like additional context about where they are and where they're going, instead of blindly following the arrows, lemming-like.
I recall only one location on the return, late at night, where I couldn't see an arrow and had to rely on the GPS to see me through — I don't think it had been nicked, I think I'd just failed to spot it in the gloom, or else the priority went that way, so no arrow required, but the paint on the road wasn't that clear or was non-existent. Having a backup at that point was certainly reassuring