Early this year, during house remodelling, I'd this idea to put some famous tracks on the wall. Internet research did not lead to something I liked — detailed, dark, artistic overhead map with track highlighted and corners labelled. Additionally I needed digital download as shipping to a country like India incurs heavy import fees and time. It's much better to locally print these.

Some examples available included illustrated racetracks's collection and studio pacific's collection, but these didn't have corners, variable width and off track area detailing was missing beyond roads.

Oh well, I'll do it myself.

Motorsport Tracks: Screens to Print

The rough plan is to get overhead track images, process them to remove undesirable artifacts, path trace the track, label, crop and finally send for printing.

Sourcing overhead images in ultra-high resolution — enough for big prints 300 dpi, that is about 35 megapixels for A2 and 70 MP for A1 — was not smooth.

The obvious choice, Google maps or earth did not have good enough satellite view to be stitched for most of these tracks. I guess they need all that extra storage space for AI models (yay!).

After scrounging a couple of different sources, I landed on Apple maps which surprisingly has an excellent detailed scan of a whole bunch of tracks.

The difference is quite impressive.

Anyways, this does the job. Apple maps also has a nice mode to hide labels/scale, and the app window doesn't get in the way of screen-shotting as much.

I now screen-shotted(yes!) sections of the track moving a bit between each scan. About 40-50 shots were used per track.

These images were now stitched into a panorama to create a single giant image that can be edited. This warmed up my now ancient 2020 Intel(!) iMac.

For Silverstone Circuit for example, this resulted in a whopping 120 megapixels image. If I were to print this on a 72dpi canvas, it'll result in a 4.23 by 3.55 meters print! This can indeed a be a good way to get some nice overhead satellite images.

• Now, over to a "secret technique" to remove on track and nearby artifacts.
• Then a whole bunch of image processing to give an artistic look.
• Next up, editing the background to have contrast to the track.
• Now the fun part, path tracing the track white over the real track.
• Finally, add curvy labels (they look nice, okay) and cropping to size

For the prints, I first tried the service from Printo, however their store messed up the scaling and printed the thumbnail(!) for the A2 prints instead of the high resolution image. The matte print quality also wasn't the best.

Next I got some samples from ProLab in glossy and matte, and settled on the glossy style.

13 prints in A2 at 16x20" (41x51 cm) cost me ₹350 (About €3.50/$4) each. A good deal for the quality it offered!

For the frames, I'm using the IKEA LOMVIKEN series. 40x50 cm for most tracks, and 70x50 cm for Nurburgring and Sarthe.

I'll also rotate the tracks occasionally

The height-matching helps with placement above curtains, which just has about 50cm of available space!

I've exported and printed the following tracks so far:

• 🇦🇹 Red Bull Ring (Austrian GP)
• 🇦🇺 Mount Panorama Circuit (Bathrust)
• 🇧🇪 Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps (Belgian GP)
• 🇧🇷 Autodromo Jose Carlos Pace (Interlagos) (Brazilian GP)
• 🇩🇪 The Nurburgring (24 hour, Nordschleife + GP)
• 🇪🇸 Circuit de Barcelona Catalunya (Spanish GP)
• 🇫🇷 Circuit de La Sarthe (Le Mans)
• 🇬🇧 Brands Hatch Motor Circuit
• 🇬🇧 Goodwood Motor Circuit
• 🇬🇧 Silverstone Circuit (British GP)
• 🇭🇺 The Hunagaroring (Hungarian GP)
• 🇮🇹 Autodromo Nazionale di Monza (Italian GP)
• 🇯🇵 Suzuka International Racing Course (Japanese GP)
• 🇺🇸 Watkins Glen International
• 🇺🇸 Weathertech Raceway Laguna Seca

You can find these for digital download on gumroad store. There's also a discount on grabbing 8 Formula 1 circuits as a pack.