so ive been building a small indoor track in my warehouse (we rent it on weekends) and im trying to figure out how tight i can realistically make the gate spacing before it just becomes not fun. right now i have like 8 gates set up and the tightest section is maybe 3 meters between gates which feels really cramped but also kinda exciting when you nail it.

problem is newer pilots keep crashing hard on that section and i dont want to wreck peoples quads or kill the vibe. thinking about spreading it to maybe 5m in that section and adding a chicane somewhere else. anyone run indoor tracks regularly and have like a rough rule of thumb for mixed skill groups? we do open practice one day and a more competitive session another day so maybe different configs for each?

yeah 3 meters is brutal for anything but high level racing honestly, even experienced guys are gonna clip gates at that spacing unless theyre flying 2s or heavily tune their rates down. when we ran indoor at our local arena we found 5-6m felt like a good baseline for the technical sections, then you can compress it to like 4m if you want one genuinely hard section that separates the field. the key thing we found is you want the difficulty to come from the combination of elements, not just raw proximity. like a tight gate right after a 180 around a pole is way harder than two tight gates in a straight line even if the straight line looks closer on paper.

for mixed sessions what we do is basically have an A-layout and a B-layout stored on the side and just rearrange like 3-4 gates between sessions. takes maybe 15 min and its worth it.

this is kinda off what youre asking but have you thought about the ceiling height issue more than gate spacing? indoor warehouse tracks the thing that kills people is low ceilings punishing any mistakes on upward trajectories, not really gate spacing. we had a similar setup and ended up having to ban certain flips and rolls in certain sections which felt weird to enforce lol. anyway on your actual question i have no idea i mostly fly outdoor but curious what you end up going with