so ive been trying to put together a semi-permanent outdoor track for our local group and the whole thing has been kind of a mess honestly. we started with those cheap pool noodle gates which everyone recommends but they just dont hold up, one windy day and half the course is gone or the noodles have sagged so bad the gate is basically a wall now.

moved to PVC frames with fabric flags and thats way better structurally but now the issue is storage and transport, we dont have a dedicated field so everything has to go in someones truck every weekend. currently looking at the collapsible carbon fiber gate options but the price adds up fast when you need like 12-15 gates for a decent course.

anyone running a mixed setup? like using the good gates for the technical sections and cheaper ones for the long straights where it doesnt really matter if they move a bit. also curious if anyone has actually built start/finish gantries from scratch that are worth anything, the commercial ones are like $300+ which is insane for what they are

yeah the pool noodle thing is kind of a rite of passage, everyone does it and everyone eventually gives up on it lol. what we ended up doing for our club is buying the skeleton frames from a local irrigation supply place ? just regular schedule 40 PVC, way thicker than the stuff in those cheap gate kits ? and cutting our own sizes. wrap some bright tape around them and honestly they look fine and way more durable. total cost per gate is maybe 4-5 bucks in material if youre buying in bulk.

for the gantry we literally just used a canopy tent frame with some coroplast signs zip tied to it. painted it up nice and from a camera angle it looks totally legit. wouldnt survive a hard crash but neither would the $300 one probably

mixed setup is absolutely the way to go, no reason to spend on quality gates for a straight. we keep 8 good collapsible ones for the technical stuff ? chicanes, split-S entries, anything where precision matters ? and just use weighted cone markers for anything on a long stretch. saves so much money and honestly the course flows better because you can adjust the straights on the fly without moving heavy stuff around.

one thing i'd add is think about your safety buffer zones before you finalize gate positions. we had a layout that looked great on paper but had one exit that pointed basically at the spectator area and we had to redesign like half the back section after the first practice day