so ive been bashing around in my backyard for like 8 months now and finally decided to actually enter a local race next month. built a 5inch on a TBS Source One, running a F7 stack with the Mamba combo, 2306 2450kv motors. feels pretty locked in on betaflight 4.4 with some filter tweaks i found in a thread somewhere on here.

anyway the actual question ? im helping set up the track for the event and have no idea how to think about gate spacing. we have a soccer field to work with, roughly 100x60m i think. how many gates is reasonable and whats the usual gap between them for a club-level race? i dont want to make something thats either boring or just gets everyone crashing constantly because the hairpins are too tight. ive watched a bunch of MultiGP tracks on youtube but hard to judge scale from footage

for a field that size id probably go 10-14 gates depending on how technical you want the layout. the thing most people get wrong their first time is spacing the straights too far apart ? you end up with guys hitting 120+ mph into blind turns and thats when things get spicy in a bad way. for club level keep your straights maybe 25-30 meters max and throw in a chicane or a low gate somewhere to break up speed.

hairpins work fine as long as you give pilots like 8-10 meters of deceleration room before the apex. one thing i actually like doing is making a figure-eight somewhere in the track because it forces crossing traffic awareness which is good practice. MultiGP has their track design guidelines PDF floating around, worth grabbing even if youre not running their format officially

honestly just print out the field dimensions on paper and move little circles around until it feels fun lol. thats basically what our club does. we ran a 9 gate layout on a similar size space last summer and people liked it. the mamba stack on source one sounds like a solid first build btw, how are you finding the tune out of the box or did you start from scratch