Red Dirt Trackcraft is a small editorial desk writing about one subject: how a private motocross track behaves, and what a person at the fence can read from it. There are sixteen dated notes, arranged in four series, and they are meant to be used rather than admired.
Signed by a desk, not by a rider
Every note here is signed The Red Dirt Trackcraft desk. That is a collective signature and it is deliberate. Attaching a note to an invented person with an invented racing history would be easy and would be a lie, and it would put a false claim of experience underneath every sentence. The desk prefers to say plainly what it is: people who read documents carefully, look at ground carefully, and write down what follows.
The practical consequence is that you will never read the words "when I raced" on this site. Where a technique is described, it is described as a method with its reasoning attached, so you can judge the reasoning rather than trust a name.
How a note gets built
The order is always the same. First the question, stated as something a person would actually type or ask. Then the search for a primary document that settles any part of it that can be settled: a rulebook, a federal standard, a published design criterion. Then the parts that no document covers, which get written as method and clearly labeled as method. Then the arithmetic, if there is any, with the formula shown and the ignored variables named.
Numbers get one of two labels and never a third. Either they come from a source, which is named with the date the desk opened it, or they are a calculation the desk performed with assumptions stated in the text. There is no third category of number on this site, and in particular there are no measurements of any real track, machine or rider.
What this site will not do
- Name a track, an operator, a venue or a rider. The subject is private tracks in general.
- Claim a lived experience, a season, a result or an injury.
- Present a generated illustration as evidence of a real event, a real machine or a real piece of equipment.
- Give medical, legal or engineering advice. A design criterion quoted from a federal standard is a quotation, not a design service.
- Publish a page that is not finished. The build of this site fails outright if any page is still a draft, so an unfinished note simply does not appear.
Illustrations
The photographs on this site are illustrations. They show the kind of ground, tool or scene a note is about; they do not document a particular property or a particular day, and no caption on this site claims they do. Where an image would have to be evidence for the point to stand, the point is made in words instead.
Corrections
If a note states something that is wrong, the desk wants to know, and the fastest route is the contact page. A correction to a fact gets made in the text itself rather than added as a footnote, because a reader who arrives next month should read the corrected version and not have to reconstruct it. Sources are rechecked when a rulebook or a standard is revised, and the date shown in each note's source paragraph is the date the desk last opened that document.
The place to start reading is how to read a track, which is the note the rest of the site leans on.