Nice. I kind of like it: you ask for help, let's see if this is it.
It's Flyn's fault I'm writing here today, so blame him, please: I know him, he doesn't care (and I will not read your possible, if any, answers: I left this forum ages ago, sorry for the intrusion).
You could by all means skip the following clearly marked
cheap philosophy, software and regulations, because you will say that you're just having fun and that's OK with me.
Go straight to the comments at the end and then do whatever you do when you do what you do.
However, given the "naggity" that prevails in this forum when trying to design a car and the many comments received here when designing, let's say, a wing, I'm (to say the least) a tad surprised by the "lack of ignorance" in track regulations, as a friend of mine says, that's why I will extend. Apologies asked, lads.
Cheap philosophy
Most of the time you could say that circuits are not always as fans want because safety is based on infrastructure.
Besides, defects will be evident in the direst circumstances, but good designs will pass unperceived, except to your colleagues.
Three people died here in the last couple of years (and with texts and all it's not hard to see why, but after)
Having said that, and thinking that your track resembles Malaysia a little, I could think about a couple of swinging curves that require special measures in it. After curve 2, between curves 3 and 4 there is a pretty dangerous sweep.
Example: notice the pattern of skid marks at Catalunya (and
the safety area is to the right, in a curve where, according to evidence, many people has "lost the rear" and crashed into the barrier to the left of the picture).
Same goes for the high speed sweeping, apparently "light" curves that you have after the backstretch: cadavera vero innumera.
Software you could use
First, the software you're using is useless. In the same way you wouldn't use Paint to draw a car body, you shouldn't use Sketch. It gives you the impression you're actually designing something, but it's too imprecise to force you to design something a racing car could use. I would suggest to use AutoCAD. Pirate it, if necessary. It's truly simple to draw a true circle and a true spiral (use a cubic curve instead, for example).
If you have no time to spend in AutoCAD, then I suggest you spend more time in the scenery than in the track, because that's what most users of your simulation will see and it will let them satisfied.
I just mention the following for my future reference, quickly copying and pasting a text I have around:
Professionals would use something like
Eagle Point, not that easy to install and harder to put to work (and it costs you a lot).
If you're groovy perhaps you will notice
Bentley MX Road: it is integrated with Google Earth and it uses string technology, the mother of all 3D-ways to model a surface and, thus, even more expensive.
Here you have some free demos that I know and that someone could find useful:
Anadelta Tessera
Autocad Civil 3D
Diolkos
Heads PRO
CAD&Pillar Modulo S (Strade)
Anadelta is probably the best.
Regulations about circuits for Formula One cars
Perhaps you would like to read thoroughly this (it's a short text, believe me, and most instructing, full of small quirks):
Appendix O to Sporting Code
If it grabs your attention, then the following documents were made for you. I'm not saying you're going to use them to the detail they have, but they will inspire you if you browse them quickly:
Some interesting ideas:
Trends in Stadium Design: A Whole New Game Read it and, lo, Brands Hatch becomes beautiful.
Notice how important is visibility: a good track is fully visible (ergo, Brands Hatch). Yas Marina, for example. Your backstretch is not visible from the main stands (which I suppose are OUTSIDE the track, to the left of the main stretch your image,
more on service road limitations ahead).
Having tackled the subject, here you find rules of thumb about control room, starters platform, control posts on track, lights, and types of vehicles used (and thus, by inferrence, parking and access to track requirements):
F1 Technical Regulations, Appendix H: "Recommendations for the supervision of the road and emergency services".
After all, racing cars won't be driven to the track: you need access roads to the center of the track, apt for lorries.
On a side note, probably nothing is more important to a refined design: marshalls cannot run faster than a person can run carrying a fire extinguisher and they require an access road.
This will limit your design AS YOU CANNOT IMAGINE.
It's like spending hours in a wind tunnel, designing a very refinated front wing and then using f%cking Pirelli tyres.
You design a road for cars that go at 320 kph but then you have to create a road around the whole track for the freaking ambulances, a road that do not obstruct views from the stands. That's not easy to do, specially because the water has to run away from both roads.
Specification of layers in Autocad, which gives you a clue about the types of vehicles, barriers, etc. you have to use. Includes some examples of drawings. If you ask FIA by mail, they will send you the examples in Autocad format, and they're mighty useful:
FIA's "List of Requirements for the Circuit Drawing":
Some examples of drawings, Autocad blocks (dwg) of objects and a "blank" drawing:
FIA's "Autocad templates with blocks and linetypes"
In case your design includes a drag strip, like the more recent and
financially oriented tracks (check Bahrain, for example: you shot two birds with the same bullet):
FIA's Procedures for the recognition of drag strips.
Specs for flag lights (the ones that replace flags at some tracks) and start lights:
FIA's "Recommended light signals for standing starts in circuit events". They are a source of complications, believe it or not.
A project for a Formula One track, designed by two students as thesis (they might help a fellow architect), in Polish. You'll find their e-mails in the link at the bottom of the page:
Lodz-Nowosky Track design
Apex's Clive Brown in a conference on circuit desing, using Power Civil
Comments
Well, not a word too soon, the meat of this post:
If you read Appendix O then you already understand all this, so forgive me for being self evident.
1. There are no curves with inverted camber in this world in the same way there are no F1 cars with non-inverted wings. Don't be stupid about that and I'm sorry for the rudeness. Forget about "I chose the camber I want": it's related to degree of curvature and water runoff.
Maximum camber is 7% and minimum is 1.5%, but that's only a start, as I'll try to explain very (believe me) quickly.
I recommend highly to take in account that probably
motorcycles will be using your track, even in a simulator. For this you should restrict camber conditions even more: weave and wobbling are the two main problems. A clarifying paper (I think) is this:
Influence of road camber in motorcycle stability
2. A flat circuit cannot be designed. In first place, there are no flat places in this Earth: water is running all the time and erosion exists, ergo flat are billiard tables, period.
Even Belgium is not flat, they have rivers. Actually, the flatter the site, the hardest the design.
Why?
Well, water is dangerous and ice is mortal (unless you come to Colombia, amigo: no ice in our tracks but anyway, plenty of rain).
So, you have to provide some slope for water to drain to some place (probably the nearest river or gully) or you will design the most expensive lake in the world and the most slippery winter surface, hockey rings excepted. Here you have a couple of basic guides on that idea:
This will be hard to achieve if you actually want to build a track on a piece of actual land. You have to visit the place when it's raining: this visit will add decades of duration to your track. Avoid like the plague the humid sites. Do not doubt to create mounds on them and provide plenty canals, gullies, gutters and all kind of crossing places for water.
Water is your enemy, the same way a good gardener do not allow puddles in a garden. Water on the track brings dust on the track (water carries mud, people). I'm not talking Bahrain here, but you get the idea.
3. There are no circular curves in this world (nowadays: the last circuit with only circular curves is from the 80's, like Catalunya).
You have to provide spiral curves at the entrances of circular curves:
you have provided some, but kind of haphazardly, or so it seems to me.
The sharper the curve the sharper the spiral curve at the entrance is. The end of your backstretch is embarrassing circular, change it now.
Given that circuits have only one direction (that should be crystal clear by now, sorry if I'm stepping on someone corns, apologies WilliamsF1), you do not need to provide spirals at the exit, unlike regular roads.
Curve at Sepang: notice it is not circular, it has an spiral at the entrance (top of the image)
Spirals make your road nicer from the point of view of the driver: the curve is "natural" (think of Eau Rouge, for example: it would be very different if circular).
Circular (top) vs Spiralized (bottom) curves: the beauty comes from hidden details, the speed even more. Flat out or braking? It's in subtleties that nobody notices, believe me
4. Point 2 takes me to explain that
you have to provide spiral curves for safety in wet or cold conditions, not only for the looks.
Why? Because
you have to be careful with the flat areas you will create when rotating the road from straights (with camber of 2% down, both sides)
to curves with a definite camber.
That means that in straights your road is kind like a roof: it goes down at 2% from the centerline to allow water to run. Now, you have to change that and provide full sideslope at the curve, right?
This means that at some point along the rotation of the surface, from straight to curve, the camber will be zero: that point is critical.
Spirals will help you to provide that point at the entrance of the curve,
instead of along the straight in the braking zone (you should have full camber at the circular part of the curve, if you wish to have the approval of racing pilots, and believe me, they notice: motorbike drivers will whine even more if you do not comply).
That's a complicated matter to explain: I have never been able to around here.
Good drivers will find that spot and be careful in the rain, btw.
There, at the "singularity", where the track is completely flat, you have stopped braking but you haven't developed full lateral force if you get your act together (that's, in part, why trail braking is lousy at most tracks, but I digress).
If you really wanted to create the resemblance of reality you should use the regular formulas for sideslope given in the Green Book. I give you the ugliest marketing director in the world, because this book sells itself:
A Policy for the Design of Highways and Streets by AASHTO
[youtube]
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5. Point 3 takes me to this: camber is proportional to curvature,
along the curve. I won't explain more.
6. You should not provide straights of more than 2 km (
but you might if you want to create a drag track inside your track, as I said).
There is a subtle point here: your design should be oriented to the race-line (instead of using the centerline) of the fastest cars that will use the circuit, by regulations (and common sense).
This will make the straights shorter and the curves longer than appear to "we, the people".
The track should not be shorter than 3.5 km nor longer than 7 km by basic regulations.
7. Things get a tad more complicated here:
width is critical for your FIA classification.
Class 1 circuits need 12 meter at least, bare minimum
BUT the number of cars that can compete is given by this formula:
Long explanation nobody should read, given for the benefit of designers of tracks, please, guys, you know who you are:
N= 0.36 x L x W x T x G
For F1 you have N=26 (let's say you want to accommodate the possibility of having 13 teams, or perhaps 14, so N should be 28)
If it's a 4-4.5 km track then L=13 (for a track from 3.8 to 4.4 km) and L=14 (for a 4.4 to 4.8 km long track, check supplement 2 in Appendix O given).
T=1.5 for races from 1 hour to 2 hours which you probably will want, given that you are trying to get 90 minutes of racing. If your design will accommodate endurance races, then forget everything I've said, btw and use T=1.5.
That's logical: short races require wider tracks because the cars are bunched.
For F1, G is 0.8. For more powerful cars (over 2000 cm) G is 0.6: more powerful cars (without wings) need wider tracks to recover if rear is lost. Old cars use G = to 1.
Having said all that, figure W.
8. You have to design a starting grid, even for a simulator.
9. About the other comments I see:
Kiril Varbanov (hi, namesake!) asks for a very short straight from the last curve to the finish line, I think. It could be, but it has to be carefully calculated because of the grid.
I don't think you can, given the dimensions I estimate quickly from your drawing: you have to think that cars have to be 6 meters apart (8 meters for F1), so if your thinking of having stock car races there, with, let's say, 40 cars, you need 240 meters for the grid, plus at least 50 meters more for the safety medical car.
You definitely DO NOT want a 5th gear curve at the start of the race (that would require a huge main stretch, believe me), specially if you're driving one of the cars: braking with other three cars at your side from 5th to 2nd gear at that huge main stretch would be like Friday the 13th, plus people in the end of the bleachers would be miles away from the action. That put limits to the DRS straight that notsofast asks.
Ilario asks for negative camber, I think and Cottrell asks for experimentation. You could, perhaps for the fun in a simulator, but you shouldn't in real life: there are rules for that, very definite.
I agree with MadMatt on the excess of 180 degrees curves and (that's what I think) too many dangerous high speed sweeping curves. Perhaps you could reconsider.
CBeck113 says the design is too long. Actually, it's short, by 1 km, give or take (check the width you get and ponder a while how could you diminish the cost of asphalt: you will arrive to that figure). His comments about mixed circuits (compromise, he says) I like.
I tried to answer kosioBG question about design software and perhaps the first curve is too close to the starting line for my intuition, contrary to his (that's a critical thing, as I tried to explain, that requires a bit of calculations).
I agree with Cam about elevation: if you consider it, you have to consider sighting distance. The vertical curves become complicated, because cars have to have visibility: this will be critical for stands position (and consider also the safety areas: you do not want people to be miles away from cars, so you have to put stands at the inner part of curves: that's complicated when you think of the access road and marshalls having, let's say, 15 seconds max to reach the car if an accident happens).
I could go on, but I got tired and I hardly can imagine someone reading this, apologies again.
See you next year (or when Flynfrog asks me again to poke my nose around this site...
).
