2012 - Course Designs - Event 9 & 10

[John_H]

Hi,

Do you have a fun course design in mind that you would like to run?

Time to put your creativity to work.

We are looking for new course submissions for Autocross Event 9 and 10.

The base layout for Lot 9 is below.

Final Submission deadlines for each event are as follows:

Course Submission Deadline for Event 9 - September 4th, 2012

Course Submission Deadline for Event 10 - September 18th, 2012

Thank you.

[schmoo]

If you're game for trying your hand at this, please be sure to check the course design requirements: viewtopic.php?f=55&t=10423

[qr25de]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/82772892@N03/7697837564/in/photostream

Preliminary design of Event 9 or 10...but definitely Lot 9

[sb_600]

Nice start, but it's going to be WAY to fast as is! with that long straighaway, some of the fast cars may be hitting 120-140!!!

I'd say add a few more slaloms/chicanes and we'd have ourselves a good course

[schmoo]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/82772892@N03/7697837564/in/photostream

Preliminary design of Event 9 or 10...but definitely Lot 9

Some feedback to inform your revisions and the input of others:
- too many straight sections -- on the south leg, from chicago box to the turn around is one big straight
- along 417 is 2 big straights with little reason to slow down

Likely these sections would produce speeds that are a bit too high to be safe in our lot.

Look at past maps to see how much curviness you need to inject. Note that there is whole sub-forum for course design inside the autox forum.

[John_H]

A good design idea to note is to use a Bezier Curve with a width of about 6 feet, which is average car width. Use that to draw the path through your course instead of a thin line and it will point out areas that need improvement. Over a distance of 3/4 mile you want to have around 20 to 30 driver inputs. Anything less and people will probably get bored with driving the course and/or the speed will be too high. From what I see your course has about 10 driver input locations. Therefore I suggest adding more bends and curves to the course to increase driver engagement and to bring the overall speed down to a safer level.

[qr25de]

Thanks for the input guys! I was hoping for a LeMans style straight...so this would likely be safe for my car but not so much for the likes of Ralph or Kev .

Updated version: http://www.flickr.com/photos/82772892@N03/7698444688/in/photostream

If someone wants to do the bezier curve stuff that'd be great, I can't figure out how to do it with MS Paint so I'll have to wait until I get home and onto OpenOffice.

[Scruffy]

Here is a draft course that I came up with the other day. I tweaked it a bit this morning to allow for another higher-speed slalom (I had offset cones in the final slalom but figured that we had linear cones last week and people weren't able to build up too much speed. I wanted to draw something inspired by the crazy Forza course Fujimi Kaido (I don't know if it's a real road...)

Scotimi Kaido.png (98.21 KiB) Viewed 880 times

This is just a draft and a lot of areas can still be altered. I don't know if the opening slalom would gain too much speed or if the u-turns would be too tight/too much, but I thought I would put this out there. Here is a picture of Fujimi Kaido:

Kaido1.jpg (28.84 KiB) Viewed 863 times

Kaido2.jpg (5.98 KiB) Viewed 859 times

[inverted]

Don't forget to account for Lot 9's rough areas and camber. Hard to design anything without physically being there unless you have some kind of robot photographic memory. I would never use paint to design anything presentable, plenty of free software out there of you don't have photoshop, illustrator or other. Bezier curves are simple once you get the hang of them.

[el_torpedo]

I like the happy face feature.

[John_H]

I will pimp this out here because everyone likes FREE stuff.

If you want a Photoshop equivalent without the price tag then The GNU Image Manipulation Program is for you.

Otherwise known as GIMP, it is by far the best free drawing program available with an extensive online help forum.

The place to get it is here: http://www.gimp.org/downloads/

[qr25de]

Yeah, I'm using GIMP but at work with a crappy mouse so my curves keep pooching it up.

[Scruffy]

Looking through course design requirements, I will have to move the stop box either further away, or closer to the u-turn as the timing equipment there would be too close to the driving line of the slalom.

[condor888000]

Here's a useful image. It shows the rough locations of the worse spots on the lot. It's not perfect, but its a start.

[Alf]

Scruffy, it's getting better but here is few things wrong.

-You need 65' distance between 2 part of the course. Those big loop gets to close to the other side.
-Those big loop, go drive them, tell me if you get out of 1st gear. The answer is, you probably don't.
-That slalom is to close to the sire. The read line is the min space if you are going in straight line. If you turn, you need to increase runoff, increase speed, increase run off.
-Radius for a 180 turn like the big one you did is 45' (that if I recall this properly)
-I can't count the parking spot, but 7 parking is bare minimum, 11 is max (At 11 spot James or Ralf car are getting in the 90km/h slalom a bit bast for SBP lot9)
-You need to go over with your design, I know the lot enough to tell you that your driving over some bad spot.

Check Seb's design, he was the lezardking of it He's definitely someone that had the eyes for it.

Keep trying and go check your design. I was on lot 4 and 5 doing the design of event #8, I drove it 5-6 times to make sure I was avoiding bad area + make sure it had enough runoff in case of someone loosing control.

[Scruffy]

All points taken, thanks all for the criticism. I'll keep trying!

[John_H]

All points taken, thanks all for the criticism. I'll keep trying!

That's the best way to get better

[Scruffy]

I had another idea. Using the elevation map, try and map a course based off of positive camber. The first event I participated in, there was a long stretching bend that was a fantastic acceleration zone simply because of the positive camber. There was no need to turn the wheel, the car just simply moved through the bend. No risks involved with stomping the accelerator. It was great.

Here's what I've come up with in just about an hour. With this map, I've tried to drive parallel to elevations and brush up to them as an embankment. I've tried to avoid all negative elevation areas, but I fear I may have drawn over one in the bottom right, and another in the bottom left. I'm going to go out to SBP this weekend and see if the elevation changes work for the course. I also want to try to avoid all of the 'Red Sea' cracks as I call them, and I definitely have to look at the stop box location to make sure I'm avoiding that bump. Soon to be updated!

There are two points on the map where two sections get close. From the legend, I would say they are somewhere between 50-60 feet. If I can find a way to spread these out, I will do so in the updated version. Are the two intersections ok? I know the event a little while ago had two, but they were both at the beginning and both were completed before the next car could go... Leave me your comments and let me know what you think before I head out this weekend.

PositivelyCamberous.jpg

[John_H]

In my limited experience I would say that that is actually a pretty decent track. As for the loops, its just a matter of timing the cars released to minimize collisions.

[schmoo]

XL51 and echocarver had the same idea of using the camber a while back. Here it is: download/file.php?id=1646

Video of my run from 2009: http://youtu.be/uIS7OaWvNik

[Scruffy]

XL51 and echocarver had the same idea of using the camber a while back. Here it is: download/file.php?id=1646

Video of my run from 2009: http://youtu.be/uIS7OaWvNik

Looking at the run, it looked a little tight. Watching the video, it was a little tight in a couple sections. Not that I'm not ok with that, just that all of events I've been a part of this year have been a lot more open than that. The section names are hilarious though! Who came up with that? "Camber Canyon", "Big Butt", "Tricky Booby"! That's good stuff.

Aside from that, What A Hero Run! Damn! I haven't really seen anyone drive quite that hard yet this year. It almost looked like you were practising for a Drift Tourney or something. Well Done!

[schmoo]

I don't know who came up with the names of the sections, but it was either XL51 or echocarver.

Bear in mind that we can't run that course as it's laid-out anymore due to the lot deteriorating.

That run might have been spectacular, but it wasn't terribly quick. 2009 was my first year with the MSM. I'm a little more efficient now.

[John_H]

Holy hell, you hung in there like a pro Schmoo. That course looks like fun. Now I want to drive it

[Scruffy]

Bear in mind that we can't run that course as it's laid-out anymore due to the lot deteriorating

Sorry Johnny Boy!

[wing]

After reflecting on that course we knew a few sections needed fixing to open it a bit.