I just discovered that Mapquest has added aerial photos of many locations to
their web site. Some race circuits are shown, such as Lime Rock, Road
America, and probably many others (haven't had time to look for too many
yet).
Anyone interested, go to mapquest.com, key in the address of the track, and
if you see a "aerial photo" tab at the top of the map, you may be in luck.
I found it easiest to zoom & pan using the graphical map until I zeroed in
on the track location (some of the tracks are actually shown graphically on
the "map"). Once I had the track in my sights, I switched to aerial photo
(click on the tab). Some "maps" don't show the track location, so sometimes
I had to switch to photo & search for the track that way. It sorta feels
like planning a bombing mission in Afghanistan ...
Tracks I've looked at so far: Lime Rock -- excellent photo; Pocono -- fair
photo; Summit Point, NHIS -- no photo available; Watkins Glen -- photo, but
you can't zoom in far enough to see much; Mid-Ohio -- the aerial photo is
missing the section where the track would appear, I suspect the Porsche
drivers have undertaken some secret operations here; Road America --
excellent photo.
Unfortunately, mapquest won't let you print the map, probably due to
copyright issues. I couldn't even do a screen print (maybe someone else can
figure out how to get around this & let us know).
Why bother looking at aerial photos? Because, in my experience, nearly
every graphical "track map" I've ever seen, of any track, is wrong. The
accuracy of "track maps" is really awful, and makes it so much harder to
learn the proper line. There are NO accurate maps of Lime Rock, NHIS, or
Pocono for instance -- they all have very serious errors in many critical
locations. The only thing you can trust for accuracy is an aerial photo.
Mark Palmer
_________________________________________________________________
///
/// vintage-race@autox.team.net mailing list
/// or go to http://www.team.net/cgi-bin/majorcool
///
|