Cal Club Autocross Forums

As I've been designing and fine tuning my course for the upcoming event, I made a very interesting discovery: it appears that the height of Google Maps' El Toro satellite photo is incorrectly compressed, so the proportions of runways 34L & 34R look much shorter than they really are. I won't share the boring details of how I figured this out (unless someone is interested), but needless to say, if you're using a satellite image to design future courses at El Toro, use a screen shot of a MapQuest image, not Google Maps.

BTW, I'll make the document I'm using available to people so they can use it to design future courses. I overlaid a grid of 10' squares on top of the satellite photo, which makes it easier to approximate distances.

I found the same issue, north to south is way off, but east west is dead on. I had measured one of the island squares at the runway junction at 250' x 250', and using the scale for east west it was right on, but I went to go north, and it wasn't even close. I even had Ken go re-measure that square to make sure I had the right numbers.

I would be interested in your blank map for future use.

Jeff Cawthorne

Kurt,

I'd also like to have your layout. There's a fair chance I'll be doing a course design for PCA in May.

No problem. Right now it's in Adobe Illustrator format, and if you have Illustrator on your computer, it's cool to be able to turn the layers on and off. If not, I can save it in PDF format as well. Just let me know which you want.

.pdf for me. Also, I think it's possible to open an illustrator file in Solidworks, so I can try that too.

towersls at sbcglobal dot net

Me 2 pls Makofoto at earthlInk dot net