westracing01's Race Track for Modular Buildings

[westracing01]

This has been a work in progress for years. It started as just a race track on a 4x8 sheet of plywood in my parents basement 20 years ago.When I went away to college the track was torn down and stowed away. Fast forward 7 years and it was resurrected when my girlfriend and I moved to our then new to us condo that had a basement. Around this same time Cafe Corner and Market Street came out and I knew that they would be excellent additions to the race track. So I picked those up, torn down what I had, laid out something new and dialed up Bricklink for the things I didn't already have.

 

This is roughly where we began.

My original plan was a city oval with lights. This is a shot of the original front stretch grandstand that was an import from my original track from back in the day.

Here we can see Cafe Corner, the Tower Crane, some vehicles (tow truck and safety truck) along with the big Ferrari Hauler.

Here's an example of the runoff, the corner marshals, the Goodyear building and catch fencing.

 

So, I don't seem to have any pictures of the middle between then and what I have now. Things were changed along the way as they always are, Green Grocer was added, the plywood was covered and it was just generally made to look like something more complete. At this point, if you haven't noticed, I want to say that this is not for a purist. I did cut some of the road plates to achieve the angles I wanted since building the track with 90 degree corners was realistic. It was also originally designed, and it still is designed, for 4 wide vehicles. The tow trucks and ambulances are 6 wide and the Ferrari Hauler is 8 wide but the rest was to be 4 stud. Now, on to the pics of where this currently resides...

 

These are in no particular order...

That's where we stand at the moment with the track. When these were taken it included all Modulars that had been released. I currently have Assembly Square sitting in the hall and of course the Downtown Diner just arrived. I do plan to include these, however, I have decided that the cars, vehicles and indeed the track itself no longer suit my vision, so changes are coming.

For starters, the track will be disassembled and a new table built. After that, the track surface, pits and garages will be converted to brick built roads. The issue I always had with this were curves. Since I finally saw the Lego Monaco Hairpin model I took a Saturday and figured out how to build brick built corners. Armed with that, I sat down at work and designed the brick built straight away pieces along with new a new Indycar prototype. My favorite racing series is Indycar so it made sense to use that as the template. I also really loved early 90's F1 so the new car incorporates design elements of both of those. Pictures of the new car and brick built straightaway to follow. The corners I only have he test model I built but seeing as how I know the technique works, that will be an issue I tackle once the new track table is built. My thinking is to get the curves right I will first lay down all the straights and then build the corners to suit.

Picture of the new Indycar Prototype.

Picture of the new car on it's brick built road surface.

The grand plan for this is a combination of what you see and the outer portion (through the woods) of the Linas-Monthelry Circuit in France. I'm not going to attempt to build the oval portion of that but, in my imagination, this city portion is built within the big oval and connects the two parts of the outer circuit. To do this, I will need much more space than a spare bedroom can offer and it will be a few years before it happens. The plan is to build a garage (in real life, I have other expensive hobbies) with a loft and the track will go in the loft portion.

Until then, the new table will hopefully be built over the winter and the new brick built track constructed. Once that is complete, the cars, safety vehicles, ambulances, tow trucks, etc. will be converted to 6 stud width and the sand traps will be converted to all Lego. My plan is to a completely Lego track with the exception of the signage and the railroad grass where bricks won't be used.

Anyway, there it is. Comment away and let me know what you think. I can take closer pictures of anything you might want to see better. I apologize for the blurry nature of some of them. Lighting is not great in this bedroom and my phones camera is probably dirty. Thank you for reading and looking!

[Jody Meyer]

What no good year or duff blimp?  this is a nice slice track, look very well thought out and constructed. 

[supertruper1988]

This looks great! Can you share your brick built corners too? I have been trying a bunch of solutions to no avail for my city.

[westracing01]

3 hours ago, Jody Meyer said:

What no good year or duff blimp?  this is a nice slice track, look very well thought out and constructed. 

Thank you! Give me some time and I'm sure I'll cook something up. There is a TV helicopter flying overhead. To my knowledge European tracks do not have Blimps. Trying to keep it somewhat realistic.

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1 hour ago, supertruper1988 said:

This looks great! Can you share your brick built corners too? I have been trying a bunch of solutions to no avail for my city.

Thank you!

Sure!

Just remember this is the test bed I used to figure out how to do it. If you attach 1x2 end to end there is enough play in the tolerance to create bends that will hold together. The trick is getting the bend to blend to the straight or brick section. That part is tricky because you're only anchoring one end of the curve, the other is going to float between the bricks. The amount of arc you put in it can vary greatly and you can get a pretty tight radius without the plate snapping apart. The problem with that is it was hard for me to model it in cad properly because there's so much variation with what you can do. That's why I decided I will build the straights first then build the corners to suit. The ends of the straights will have to be built differently so the plate curve will be held snugly.

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This is the example of how the plate curve will tie into the brick straight. The ends of the straights will have to be built 1 wide by 3 high where the third plate is actually a tile since the stud on a 1x1 brick is too tall. The other thing is the 1x2 plate curves bend better in one direction than the other, so you have to be careful if it's a tight radius and build from the inside of the corner out.

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[AllanSmith]

Blocks magazine has excellent articles on building curves. Issue 20 from June 2016 and issue 33 from July 2017 can be bought in digital form. Blocksmag.com 

 

Edited December 10, 2017 by AllanSmith
Added magazine covers

[Vindicare]

Despite the cut plates  this is fantastic! It has that real world feel that a road course has. Your original picture reminded me a lot of Pocono...but the new one is even better. Well done!

[westracing01]

Wow, two years and I haven't updated this at all... Well, life gets in the way sometimes.

The change to brick-built roads required a lot of work. I re-decked the table to get it as level as possible and I disassembled the previous circuit. Brick Built curves definitely were a challenge but I managed to build one, at which point I realized that there simply wasn't enough room with the size I had to work with to build the entire circuit as I had before, so a layout change was needed. That really tight first chicane and hairpin are gone. There will now be a 90* left for T1 followed by another 90* left at T2 with the pit exit in between. That flows out into a tight but flat out right at T3 before the back straight to the double left Palace corner (T4/T5 in this layout.) Following that is the pit entry straight to T6 before the final left back to S/F. 

There's a lot of work left, but the track is in place from Pit Exit to Pit Entry. Pit road, the front straight and some additional detail side roads have to be finished, but I need more parts. I severely underestimated how many parts are consumed in brick built roads. 

Here's where we are now:

Obviously a TON of work is left. Retaining walls, runoff, catch fence, cars, safety vehicles, garages, all along with the completion of the track surface along with building the Corner Garage and Downtown Diner which I have in their boxes under the track table. This new layout will house every existing Official Modular to this date and has room for the next 5 after whatever we get for 2020.

 

EDIT: Almost forgot... That "Indycar" you see in the foreground is the size of the cars that will be on display here. Complete with poseable steering and working wheel tethers. I'll get a better picture of that later. Think of it as a cross between late 80's Turbo F1 cars and today's modern Indycar, without the aeroscreen or Halo. 

Edited December 4, 2019 by westracing01

[MrBrickMan]

THis is the first time I'm seeing this and I am very impressed. The brick built roads really take it up a level.

[LegoDW]

The first thing that come to my mind is wow you are very disciplined staying with one theme.  My city has a bit of everything in it, congrats on saying true to your vision. Second thought is you need a larger table. Looks great.  Third thought, I really don't have a lot of advice to offer.  You really have done a nice job here.  You could add a airplane hanging from your ceiling with banner trailing behind, something race themed.  You might add a section for concessions and common space for the fans.   Not sure if you want this level of detail, but TLG is offering traffic signals.  Might add a nice touch with some custom support poles.  

Don't wait two years to post your next update.  Really like what you have done here.

 

[westracing01]

Haha, I won't wait two years. I ordered what I think is all the parts I need to finish the track surface/pits. Once those are in, then I will build out the rest of it with what I had previously (walls, catch fence, grandstands, etc.) Eventually, I plan to also install traffic lights, etc. to really make it look the part. WAY down the road I'll see about installing lighting for the houses, etc.

I have to rebuild most of the support vehicles (ambulance, tow trucks, safety trucks, etc.) to a wider format (current 4 wide or 4/6 wide) to better match the race cars. 

You can't see it, but there's a pretty old City TV Helicopter tied to the ceiling fan controls above the table.

I've had some personal stuff come up in the last few weeks but hopefully that will take care of itself after this weekend and I can take some time to get the track surface built. I did manage to get the Downtown Diner built and put in place. 

I need to detail the race car too since I think that's a pretty clever design.

Anyway, thank you for your interest!

[gmoltra]

Really amazing, your work is brilliant. I’m building a F1 paddock and in the future I’ll try to build a track like yours. I hope to see some more pics soon!! 

[westracing01]

Told y'all it wouldn't be two years... Haha. On with the pics!

OK, this is what it looks like when you first walk in the room...

This is the revised Turn 1/2/Pit Exit. I changed the sand trap to be more sandy, but I still need about 4-5000 more round 1x1's to make it really look right. 

Shot from T4/T5 up the back straight. Thinking of changing the Marboro bridge stairs on the left so they're not in the road.

 

Someone asked before how I did the curve. This is how I did it. It's certainly not 100% perfect, but it's not bad. Basically I had to build a frame to hold the end points of the curve and let tension do the rest of the job of keeping it in place.

 

Start/Finish line. Checkerboard is built right into the track with bricks like everything else.

Scuderia Ferrari mulling over the car in the pits.

Shot from T1 back up the front straight/pit road. Pit buildings need to be built still (along with a ton of other stuff.)

Shot from T6 down to T5. Basement on the right is for the Corner Garage that is yet to be built and the open space on the left is for the new Book Store Modular. 

Race cars, safety crews, ambulance, medical car, pit garages, catch fence, landscaping, still needed, but it's much closer than it was. Will continue to update and I go along. I have a ton of parts and some idea's for things I want to change (like the drains in T1, move them from the outside of the corner to the inside) so that'll get updated as we go. 

This, I think, looks great, but it is EXTREMELY part intensive. There is a small fortune in the just the track surface along with thousands of parts. Each 10x10 piece of track has some like 92 or so parts. All told, the track surface alone is something on the order of 3100+ parts, that excludes the sidewalks, barriers, etc. 

Let me know what you think and it there are any questions I can answer!

Edited February 6, 2020 by westracing01

[westracing01]

Sorry about some of the image quality, my phone doesn't take great pictures. 

^ Overall shot of the layout. Catch fences are up, trees are in, marshall posts are manned and there are some cars on pit road being worked on.

^ Cinema Corner. Raised the grandstands to the left and modified the Marlboro crossover bridge so it didn't block the road.

^ Oh, what's this? A gentleman has parked his 250GTO right in front of the restaurant... Seems appropriate.

^ Just another overall shot from the opposite end of the course. The baseplates you see that don't seem to belong there are just to see if I had the space I thought I did. They will also serve as the base plates for the pit/paddock area once I figure out how I want to build it.

^ This is the modified crossover bridge mentioned earlier.

^ One last overall shot from the last corner.

[Vindicare]

This is great. I’ve never seen a themed city quite like this. I love city courses, so this is right up my alley. It’s almost making me want to do this. Almost. 

[westracing01]

New pit garages built. All doors slide on a track, roofs are removable for each garage to access inside. Still need some finishing touches but we're getting there. The rail you can barely see on the front will be for the names of the teams in those particular garages. 

An eye-level view from the middle rows of the Turn 1 grandstands.

View of the back of the garages where you can see the access road for the rear doors. The media center/care center on the right (with the goodyear logo) has been removed. The media center is now atop the garage at the pit exit end complete with broadcast center (with announcers) and a larger media room behind it. A stairway and crossover to the roof has yet to be built but I think I have the parts for it, just need to build it. 

[westracing01]

^ Shot looking down into the newly rebuilt "Goodyear Media Center" located atop the pit garages. There are two TV broadcast rooms (or one TV room and a Pit Steward room) overlooking the pit lane with a large room behind that for the print reporters and media gatherings.

^ Shot from the front... Clearly.

^ And a shot from the back showing the access road to the rear garage entries along with the stairs and crossover for the TV and Media credentialed to access the media center.

My wife doesn't care for the blue roof and thinks it should be grey to better go along with the garage roof. I'm undecided. On one hand I can see her point, on the other there's something that I like about the blue roof. What say you Eurobricks?

[weeble1688]

The blue roof is definitely in keeping with the Goodyear branding, especially if there might be a Goodyear blimp flying overhead for race coverage!

[gotoAndLego]

This has really turned out cool, the curved section looks great. If you are up for suggestions, consider adding the Yard of Bricks from the Indianapolis Speedway with some dark red brick-bricks.

[westracing01]

Thank you!

Funny you say that, I have some left over "brick" pieces. 

[westracing01]

Update will coming within the next week or so. I decided that I didn't like the pit exit so I extended the track table 8" to build a dedicated pit exit road. Going to brick built roads made moving the entire T1/T2 complex a whole lot easier.

[Modeltrainman]

@westracing01 This is very cool!  My first thought was it reminds me of Daytona.

[westracing01]

Sweet! Thank you! That's exactly what I modeled it after.

Baseplates showed up today so I can lay out the pit extension. Built a new medical center too. It's a pain to reach but I like where I tucked it in. There are two stretchers, waiting room, doctors, etc. inside. The doors on the right are for the ambulance to back in. They both swing open into the inside so the stretcher can be unloaded without photographers prying eyes. The doors also open individually should a driver require being seen but is not otherwise incapacitated. Those were a pain to build and get to work right. I had hinges top and bottom, but the doors jammed as you closed or opened them. Instead, I had to build them like the front doors on the theatre. Somehow, that far more complicated way of doing it allows them to function perfectly. I will get pictures of that when I get a chance. 

 

[joacim]

Lovly building and a nice progretion.

[westracing01]

Small update...

The boys looking over the car while the drivers discuss who's going to take it for a spin once the Sports Cars are done on track. To the right, the head honcho is chatting with some wealthy patrons... Can see one of the two new pit tool boxes I made.

Decent shot looking over the garages and media center toward T4/5. You can see the new pit lights I added on the front and might be able to make out the small pedestrian lighting on the back.

The Porsche Club Grandstand on the end of the garages approaches final completion. Crews are busy adding some finishing touches but it is open for spectators during work.

Gilles Villeneuve's Ferrari on display at the Corner Garage.

Potato picture of basically the whole track... This picture sucks. My phone is old... Haha.

Further revisions to the pit exit. Safety Car (green) and Medical Car (white) now parked so they can both get onto the track when needed by exiting from the inside of the track instead of the outside of a corner.

 

There's still a ton to do to it. I have to finish all the walkways and parking area's with tiles, build another tow truck, rebuild the T6 crane, build another ambulance and clean up the one I do have, built A LOT more race cars (the F1/Indycar style), get more spectators, replace that lousy T1/T2 gravel trap with all round 1x1's so it actually looks right, build all the pit equipment, etc. Little by little. I mean it'll never be done for sure but it's plugging along.

Edited December 1, 2020 by westracing01

[Daanski]

What can I say? I.Totally.Love.This.??