I want to know what the best parts of a track are to different drivers. Either the best single sections of a track or characteristic that make a track driveable/raceable and people enjoy.
Low on the list for most I’d imagine, but to me aesthetics are nice. I like a track that is clean and well thought out in terms of runoff areas (safety) and has good lines of sight (again safety).
I am not a huge fan of parking lot tracks but I’ll take what I can get.
I like tracks that require you to use the curbing, at least some of them. I find those more exciting to drive. There’s a lot of ways to do this wrong, though, and then you end up getting nearly thrown out of the kart. Those tracks with curbing like that aren’t so fun.
Another favorite feature I dig in tracks are places that make braking zones very tricky. For example, the “Sand box” corner at Adams Kart Track is notorious for being really, really hard to figure out. It required you to lock the brakes up, slide the kart sideways ever so slightly to the right, then release the brakes at just the right moment to get the kart to roll the other way into a sharp left hairpin. It was really fun to get right.
One of my favorite tracks to drive of all time has to be Grange (I’ve mentioned this before), because they managed to make the elevation change really tricky. For example, they made one corner a 180 degree hairpin, sloping downhill, off camber. It was the wildest thing. They also have a fast right hand kink at the bottom of a long downhill straight that heads into a hard right hand hairpin for the first turn, which made race starts really challenging.
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I’ve never actually been bothered by the runoff aspect of it. Having run into many a barriers in my time racing, it really isn’t that bad. As long as there’s give in it then having bags/barriers/anything a few feet off the track is fine with me. Obviously I don’t enjoy running into stuff but it never bothered me. I found blind turns to actually be exciting. I never thought of the safety aspect of it but I can understand the concern. To me, that’s just a part of racing.
I also love curbing a kart. It’s more exciting and feels better to me, but there’s a couple tracks around here that do not have friendly curbing at all. My tuner hates it and believes there is no reason to ever hit most curbs but I’m halfway over some of the ones he said not to touch.
I think one of my favorite features is high speeds and hard braking, or big elevation changes. For some reason those two things have always been what make a track memorable for me.
Long straights, high speed, fast flowing corners leading into heavy breaking zone. Most people I know find them boring, but that’s what appeals the most to me and where I’ve always excelled. I’m very fortunate that my local track has some semblance of that, especially since kart tracks don’t usually have very long straights. Monza and Road Atlanta are my 2 all time favorite tracks as a reference.
That said, Atlanta Motorsport Park’s elevation changes always comes back to mind as a surreal experience. So maybe, I the same second point as @Aaron_Hachmeister_13
I think one of my favorite features is high speeds and hard braking, or big elevation changes