so ive been building out a small indoor track in a warehouse space we rent on weekends, maybe 40x60 feet, and trying to figure out how to space the gates without it just feeling like a straight drag race or alternatively a total mess where nobody can actually flow through it. ive watched a bunch of multiGP track layouts online but most of them seem designed for way bigger spaces.

right now i have 5 gates and 2 flags and the shortest gap between them is like 15 feet which even on a 3 inch feels really cramped, like you cant actually carry any speed through the sequence without clipping. was thinking about doing more elevation changes to break up the monotony but the ceiling is only about 14 feet at the peak so theres a hard limit there.

anybody built an indoor track in a smaller space and found something that actually works? especially curious if the gate angle matters as much as spacing or if im overthinking it

gate angle matters way more than most people think, especially indoors. if you're putting everything perpendicular to the line of travel you're basically just making checkpoints and there's no flow to it. angling your gates like 20-30 degrees off axis forces pilots to actually arc into them and you get that rhythm going even in a tight space. we ran a track in a similar footprint last winter and the best layout we landed on had almost no straight sections at all, just a continuous s-curve with 2 split-s dives off a raised platform we built from plywood and pvc. the elevation change is huge for making a small space feel bigger, even if it's only 3 or 4 feet of drop.

also 15 feet between gates on a 3 inch is genuinely tight, but not unworkably so if the approach angle is forgiving. the problem is usually that people set up the line so you're always fighting the gate rather than flowing through it. worth just flying the space with no gates first and seeing where you naturally want to turn, then building around that.

dont overthink the layout too early, just throw stuff down and fly it a few times then move things. we spent like 3 hours argueing about gate placement before our first session and then changed everything after the first 10 minutes of actual flying anyway. the space tells you what it wants to be pretty quickly