Ian, Yes, very nice. However, my answer is yes and no. The document is directed at curators and is almost entirely about maintenance, surfaces and equipment. GRV has a similar one. While very important, I have no particular competence in that area and therefore can contribute little. My interest is in design and layouts where two factors are in play: (1) I have a good appreciation of what does not work (due to race data analysis and observations), and (2) I can make broad but not specific proposals about building a good track as that demands a large amount of analysis and investigation, such as the job UTS is now doing. In any event, my query about gradients is not answered in that document. Nor is positioning of boxes and similar subjects. Let me offer some examples. At Wenty, the 2001 changes (the last ones) involved some sort of fiddling with the rail alignment approaching the turns. It has never been defined but the effect is clear as a bell - it favours hard railers and disadvantages non-railers more so than a more evenly constructed turn - ie they run off more unpredictably than they used to. Track bias is therefore increased. Much the same happened at Maitland in 2010, as well as at Launceston and (the old) Cannington. All offer excessive bias. One message you could draw out of this is never to build anything other than a turn with consistent radius all the way round. Dogs have enough on their mind at this stage and do not need to make extra adjustments to their course. Another example is at Goulbourn where some miracle mind decided to install a 450m bend start which caused the 1 dog to follow a snake like course for the first 20m. In time, the horror was realised and they shifted the start to a kinder 440m trip. At no stage during either of those jobs did anyone assess that the home turn was too flat, causing dogs to be thrown wide (as at Bulli). In other words, Goulbourn levels are out of whack, never mind what the cambers are. A small excuse at Goulbourn is that they had to cater for the level of the 700m start but that is a pretty weak way of approaching a reconstruction job - like building a leaning tower of Pisa on purpose. (Maybe the extra $1.2m now allocated will address that but we don't know because it is all a secret). No such excuse is available at Bulli, where they built the current post-flood track with shocking cambers (negligible) from the latter part of the main turn into the straight, also causing dogs to wander off into the distance. No worry for hard railers, though. Then you have several cases in Vic where that Bulli-like problem also exists. But there, the GRV manual does specify cambers all around the track, more or less. Unfortunately, it does not say where the high cambers start and finish - consequently they tend to flatten out too early. This is a basic engineering matter so if you did that on a freeway you would find cars veering off onto the median strip on turns to the left, and v.v. Hence my query - where does the 10% start and finish? And will they get rid of the turn before the turn? Either way, as a courtesy at least, the detail of the Wenty work should have been specified publicly long before work started. Secondly, that GRNSW reference is poorly titled. It is nothing more than a curator's guide to maintenance. As such, it might help a bit with "the risk of injuries", but not much. Design is infinitely more important.
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