Seeking Track Design Feedback: Monster Jam Edition!
Hi everyone! I know this community is mostly about Hot Wheels, but I'm hoping you can lend your track design expertise to a slightly different project. I'm building a Monster Jam track for my YouTube channel, and I'd love to get your feedback on the layout.
I've attached some photos of my recent track design. As you can see, it has some similarities to Hot Wheels tracks but is twice as wide, and has a jump at the end. However, it's also designed for larger trucks and lots of action.
I'm particularly interested in your thoughts on the flow of the track, and any suggestions for improvement. Even if you're not familiar with Monster Jam, I'm sure you have great ideas for creating exciting and challenging race tracks.
The current set up is: JLH Kraft 4 lane start gate, into orange track, turn 1 is Crash racers, turns 2-4 are Trace Racers, and the blue track is from tracer racers as well, and end with a 4 lane jump for the finish line.
Thanks in advance for your help!
Discussion
The best piece of advice out there (not mine, but the general accepted rule when track building) is start from the bottom up. Make sure the trucks/cars can make it ALL the way down to the finish. Monster Trucks are notoriously unstable so making them go around corners/turns is pretty tricky to say the least. I would suggest making sure the trucks are consistent to n crossing the finish as you work from the bottom up and the layout will kinda present itself to you. It'll take some fine tuning, but in the end, you will get there
Hey there Diecast Mayhem, I figured it was easier to reply on your thread here then in the youtube comments. I think your general layout will work and you are trying hard with what you have available. What could help you is having turns with different radius, the crash racers turn radius is roughly 250mm so like you have found you have to stagger them then the trucks aren't exactly in synch and the tracks are kind of all out of synch even though the trucks ultimately travel the same distance. What you want is your 90° turns to be 300mm and 200mm radius, an example of this is here but with nested 180° turns:
Also in the comments you were asking how the trucks went down my current setup which they sadly don't as they lose all their steam at that first 180° turn, but i wanted to share this with you to show they could go around a track that was targeting them as the main user:
youtu.be/U04B9h88mJI
Thank you for everyone's advice. Irons Diecast Racing thank you for letting me know about the diameter of the turns. The pic you post of the two turns (one inner and one outer) looks really good. I definitely think I need a 3d printer, to make my own tracks. I think it would definitely help. You're right about just using what I have on hand. I just want to make a really good Monster Jam track, that races like a track set up, not just a drag race. I'll keep working on it. I wanted to post a link to one of my races with this track. It works, for the most part, but still needs work. Thank you
- Looks good. The trucks seemed to do well in the corners — JBlotner42
- thats a great build so far — dr_dodge
interesting Idea
dr