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CAUTION: What follows is a long boring post about designing courses in the GK area, and is of greatest interest to future event chairs/course designers. Skip this post now if you don't care about that stuff! This will help future event chairs decide if they want to use that area and let them know some of the things they will have to deal with.

Golden Knights Course Designers Info

Here's my thoughts on the GK course from the T&T, and using that part of the site, after having been the one that set it up. This is somewhat of a guide for those who may be thinking of designing courses there in the future.

The first rule is that the course, the pits, the grid, and all people must stay away completely from the painted logos that the Golden Knights have placed there. We must also be sure to leave the place neat and clean. We should not use paint in the GK area so that we minimize our disturbance to the site. We should in no way disturb or be near the steel canopy.

I originally had very high hopes for the course. Walking those taxiways, I could just envision a number of fairly high speed sweepers which naturally fit in with the bends in the taxiways near the steel shelter. The concrete was really pretty good for large sections of pavement. Of course it would also be ruined in spots by 3" deep holes too.

Reality is often different than what we dream of, and such was the case for this course. The first two gentle right hand bends (which happen before you get even with the steel canopy had to be fairly slow. There is a utility pole there at track left, a piece of conduit that runs across the runway near the steel canopy, and plenty of potholes to work through. So that section had little flexibility and was not suited for higher speed sweepers.

Now we get onto the first good straight section, which is where we put the first slalom. We have some flexibility there with regards to the type of elements that are on that part of the taxiway. There is room for a lane change, or some shallow offsets. Be aware of the small tree that is at the end of this section on the right, just before the right hander. It isn't huge, but it is big enough to destroy a car.

The line for the right hand sweeper after the slalom had to be fairly far away from the inside grassy edge because of large broken sections near the apex. This also limited the speed that could be carried through there, but it was open enough to allow for some fun.

The section that follows (you are now headed towards the main runway) is a real bear to design a course on. Once again, the broken concrete allows fairly little flexibility. We managed to get a lane change there and I think a couple of offset gates.

Then comes the third gear straight. It's a straight simply because there was one, and only one, path through there. Even that required us to run over a gap in the concrete that was about three inches wide. The way the concrete is angled at this "gap", it can only be run in the direction we traveled. If you go the other way, your tires will hit the wrong edge of a 1" high concrete ramp. Traveling in the direction we went in the T&T, you actually got launched over the hole, so it didn't feel too bad. In a stock street car, if you didn't know it was there, you probably didn't think anything about it.

Now we get to the right hand sweeper that blends onto the main runway. There is some room to choose what kind of line and how fast of a turn you want to design there. This is one of the two most fun places to work out a design on this configuration. Lots of possibilities. The great thing about this sweeper is that there is plenty of room for a car to spin and still stay on the pavement.

Now we're entering the main runway where Jim had most of his course. For the T&T course, I created this big "S" section, which did require the cars to go through a change from concrete to asphalt while the car was braking and turning at track left. I was a little worried about the surface change causing huge traction problems. It turned out not to be a big issue, at least for most drivers anyway.

What came next was not what I had in mind. We were out of cones, running out of energy, and running out of good pavement, and had just spent over an hour and half trying to make this really cool section of features that just didn't work because of the broken sections we kept running into. Frustrated that we just couldn't make it work with the few cones we had left, we picked up a lot of hard work and put down a nice plain slalom.

So the T&T course ended with a slalom and for traffic flow reasons, it had to stop well before the next crossover. Other cars coming to/from the element sections had to be able to access the crossover, so we couldn't let the course run that far. This would not be an issue for a regular event.

Looking Ahead..

I think the last section could be much better designed for a full course event. With enough cones, and the ability to allow the course to bend into a right hander onto the crossover that was near the finish, the course could be about 5 to 7 seconds longer. We could also make big improvements on the last 100 yards before the crossover, and provide one more great sweeper before the finish.

The downsides to working at the GK area are:

1) On 75% of the taxiways, you have very little flexibility in what sections of the taxiway you use due to busted concrete.

2) The taxiways at the GK loop are narrow. They seem narrower than the traditional "P" and in generally poorer shape in some critical areas. The narrowness limits the kind of features you can have.

3) Hard objects (trees, one light pole) close the edge of the taxiways means care must be exercised in those areas with the design. You must also be careful that there is ZERO chance of a car hitting the steel canopy.

4) Pavement condition.. We can probably run there another time or two the way things are. But.. if we were to continue to use that configuration, Scott is correct, some patching has to be done.

5) Last minute changes in availability- though I'm told the chances are slim once we have it reserved, the possibility always exist that a few days before the event starts, we could have the US military pull rank on us.

6) Right now, at least one of the taxiways can only be run in one direction.

Some of the pros are:

1) The potential is there to have at least two if not three fairly open sweepers. It is possible to lay out a fairly open and fun "Lbg style" course there.

2) The pavement on the main runway down there is good in sections. (But the more I work with it the more I get the impression that it isn't as good as I once thought it was.)

3) Distance to walk to worker stations is reasonable

4) Good course for spectating

Observation:
The wireless finish is most likely needed. It may be possible, if the finish of the course utilizes the last crossover for part of the way that just maybe, we have enough cable to run to the start and finish. We'd have to measure it and it would be close.

Sorry this got so long.

Miles

P.S. A special thanks goes to my event co-chairs (Graham, Rob, Chris and Emmett). Also, Dustin gets a big thank you for helping with this course. He had some great ideas and is a great course designer in the making.