Hi Bury,
Spotted your chat about track design, and although I'm not involved in any way with your club, I have been involved in building a new track in Weston (WORM in the South West) over the last few months, so have an idea of what your going through, both on the design front and the manpower and effort!
Prepping to build ours we spent a lot of time looking at other tracks: oople, youtube, UK, US, Europe, japan. I have been doing nationals and picked up many ideas from what are supposidly some of the best tracks in the country.
Our main design goal was to create something that had no hard edges, no obstacles and no geometrically engineered shapes. We specifically did not want to make a touring car track with 'features' (like in that vid above!), or an indoor track outdoors. They can look really nice and well dressed, but are not really offroad IMO.
We tried to create a landscaped and shaped OFFROAD area that could have track markings laid anywhere in any direction, that offers smooth transitions between lumps, banks, bumps, camber changes and elevation changes. Something that makes the most of (and enhances) the natural features that the area we had already possessed. We also then planned in a few areas that would offer jump opportunities if the track was laid correctly, but that even then those features could be run and used with variation.
That was the goal, and we're still finding out how well we've done, but the signs so far are good, and the feedback has been great so we're quietly confident we've achieved some of our goals...so far!
If I could offer any design advice...Features that make you slow to a crawl so you can make them without crashing are not racing features, they are obstacles...it's offroad racing...not rock crawling, and we all want to go fast when we're racing!!!
Think beyond the normal jumps and table tops (although having a bit of that is obviously cool!), and think shapes! Shapes and camber make for technical challenge without severely punishing driving mistakes...this not only makes for fun tracks and better racing, but less marshalling too...and we know how much we all dislike marshalling, and being marshalled
Anyway, good luck, I look forward to seeing the fruits of your labours
