The 1/32nd scale club I'm a member of has decided that they'd like to have a nice little 4 X 8 road course in HO to still run on. This is something we've been talking about since forming the 132 Rally Club for a while, and this morning I was toying around with a 4 X 8 I had done a while ago and struck on what I think may be as good as it gets for the size.

http://i192.photobucket.com/albums/z262/FresnoPete/MillerSpeedway.jpg

Red lane is 29.53', green lane is 31.10'. That means that it's only 0.02 miles difference in scale, or about 104'. If that weren't close enough both lanes have 765 degrees of left turns and 405 degrees of right turns. With the crosses before and after the huge 18" sweeping turn 2 it nearly evens it up perfectly, so no need to switch lanes halfway through. Yoshi has another AFX Electronic Control Station that could very well find it's way on the layout even though I'd rather have a Pro terminal track with power packs for each lane. The area at the upper right was designed in to allow a laptop to sit there if computer scoring ever is used.

With the exception of turn 1 which is a multiple radius turn all of the other variable radius turns open to allow faster exit speeds. Getting out of 6 and 6A onto the front stretch allows the cars to launch hard after a couple of hairpins. Coming out of 2 and 2A into the tight turn 3 will be tricky but 3A opens to onto a short straight and a very fast 18" radius turn 4. There will be no elevation changes with this track, and other than some foam board curbing and run off area and the fencing very little scenery will be done. This is so it can be stood up and stored on it's end in the garage.

Track cost for everything including the Pro terminal track and 2 power packs is just over $200 from BRS, which means about $15 from each club member except Chip Gregory for the parts. Chip works for Home Depot, so he would be our source for the 4 X 8 sheet of whatever base we build it up on, and Chip's wife Laura works for a craft store where we can get the foam board pretty cheap for the curbing.

Not sure what cars will run but I think the Mega G's are going to like it. Obviously this is either a Grand Prix or a Sports Car course but I am going to lobby hard for open wheelers. We had talked about getting a Super International and setting up temporary courses but that gets tedius, especially since I'm the one who always has to set them up and take them down. This is more or less portable, and can be stored fairly easy.

Can you put the 2nd lane change somewhere where the red lane gets to take a curve on the outside once at the end of a straight? As is, red gets the inside everywhere except the already slow turn 5. Seems like red will suffer. Wish I had a specific suggestion but I'll keep staring at it and maybe one will come to me.

I know it looks that way, but the trade off is red gets a foot and a half shorter track length. It gets the easy way around in turn 5 and pretty much shares the rest of the hard turns. Most of this track is big sweepers and once we laid it out it's a lot faster than any of us thought it would be using SG+ cars. We moved the cross to the exit of turn 1, it doesn't change anything except the speed entering that cross. You're nearly flat footing it from the exit of turn 1 all the way to turn 5 with just a blip of throttle in the middle of turn 3. That 6" in turn 3, all it does is change the attitude of the car just enough that you're really set for 3A and 4. Both lanes run really close times, Yoshi has run identical 2.38's as fast times on two different nights with the same car.