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Old 11 Nov 2024, 11:24 (Ref:4234885)   #1
Not Harry Potter
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Why the fascination with track design?

Forgive me for being a little 'philosophical' with my first post, but I am hoping to learn what is the motivation for others for their interest in motor racing track design?
For me it was as a child, and the Observers book of Motor sport by Graham MacBeth, which had a few pages of mid 70's F1 circuits in bold B&W. I had another book which had a map of Brands Hatch, which showed the racing line, although I can't remember the title.
Since then I have been fascinated by motor racing circuits both old and new; either looking up real ones, re-designing them, or creating my own imaginary circuits. I love maps, and would often use street maps (the A-Z of London for example) to create imaginary street circuits, or look at an OS map of an area and work out where a road course, or a closed circuit might go. Any aerial photo of an aerodrome, my mind would be mapping out how it could be repurposed as a motor racing venue. Or I would simply use my imagination to create a location and with a literal blank piece of paper!
What is it for you?
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Old 13 Dec 2024, 23:58 (Ref:4238787)   #2
kerb
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for me, it was helped by hotwheels cars. what i would do is make a track on the floor by laying pencils down as "barriers", and then almost do a sort of stop motion with a bunch of cars.

and then mum would plow through it with the vacuum cleaner. so I started recording the tracks down i an old school book.
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Old 25 Jan 2025, 22:30 (Ref:4242388)   #3
Yannick
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For me, the fascination with track design developed in my teens. It came in part from racing sim video games in which a track design would help the player navigate his position on the track, and in part from the stickers and posters from my family's visits to F1 races in the 70s that my family still had on display inside our parking garage: many of them showed track maps of circuits that weren't included in then-present day racing sims. So one night when I was bored, I started drawing some circuits of my own.
Then, the tragic events of 1994 in F1 that led to many track improvements got me interested in the different kind of safety features that a racetrack could have. So I tried to incorporate these into my designs as well.
I liked to come up both with circuits that were meant to provide really good racing but also with weird conceptual tracks. The latter also opened up the door for some fun bits of satire. And then, Bureau Tilke, the premier track design firm at the time, began creating repetitive, samey new circuits, regardless of what would have been possible by exploring different concepts. That development convinced me that for a a racing series to be interesting for spectators, it has to have on its calendar the kinds of racetracks that provide not always the same but instead different challenges to both drivers and engineers, so one team can come up with a way different solution than another team.
I'm not a video game developer so I have probably hit the ceiling of where I can take this special interest. Yet I'd be probably be as curious as any designer on this section of the forum about how a favourite track that I have drawn several times through the years would actually drive like on a a racing sim, and if the design is actually able to produce the desired results in terms of on-track action.
These days, however, I'm way more concerned with planning interesting routes for my own cycling trips than fictional racetrack design. Yet, when I accidentally see a shape somewhere in everyday life that would lend itself well to a racetrack design, I try to snap a quick picture of it. By the way, if you dig deep into the history of the forum, that's how the phrase "it's a ginger" originated, which I used to describe the tracks of John Hugenholtz.
Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that having been able to take a slow ride in a road car around Spa Francorchamps in the early 90s when it was still part of public roads surely also must have contributed to the fascination.
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