Friday, March 27, 2009

Formula 1 Season Google Maps

Silverstone Grand Prix Simulator
This weekend sees the start of the 2009 Formula 1 season with the Australian Grand Prix from Albert Park. To celebrate the start of the new race season I have created a kml of the Albert Park track.

http://somekmls.googlepages.com/Australia.kml

You can view the kml in Google Earth but more impressively you can use the amazing Silverstone Simulator Google Earth plug-in created by The KMZ website. To view Albert Park in the simulator you need to

1. Cut and paste the kml above into the box that says, "KML/KMZ containing Path"
2. Press the 'Initialise' button
3. Enter a speed into the Speed box
4. Press 'Start'

Here's some grainy video of what you should see:


Australian Formula 1 Circuit from Keir Clarke on Vimeo.

Albert Park in Street View

It is also possible to tour the Albert Park circuit in Street View. I used Map Channels excellent Dual Maps creator to produce a Street View map of the circuit. Dual Maps lets you view Street View alongside Microsoft Maps Bird's Eye view so is a pretty amazing way of taking a virtual tour of the circuit.

Glotter 2009 FIA Formula One Race Calendar
Glotter has created a Google Map of the eighteen race tracks around the world hosting Formula One races this year. If you want to know more about each race the site also includes links to the website of each racetrack.

Glotter provides the option of embedding their map in your own website or blog through cutting and pasting a small piece of code. It even has a Google Gadget of the map.

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2 comments:

Romyn said...

Hi Keir,

Love the Aussie fly-through :)

You might like to know I've done a KMZ for this years Formula season and now that GE 5 has it's new touring capabilities I'm adding a "driver-view" flying lap to each circuit to that collection. The Tours run at racing speed and there's also a speedo to show what's what and when.

So far I've got the 1st three GPs done (+ Silverstone of course) but the others will follow shortly.

The KMZ is a network link, so I can update as new imagery becomes available (which happened a fair few times with my file last season) and when I add new tours, ... and can be found at:-

http://www.thekmz.co.uk/2009/03/formula-one-2009-season-kmz-file/

...full details of what's in the file is listed in the above blog post.

If the first race is anything to go by this year's going to be an exiting one :)

Kindest regards
Romyn
(at TheKMZ.co.uk - Nymor on the GEC)


(As an aside there seems to be an issue with these "close-to-the-ground" tours that means they are best viewed with Terrain switched off in GE. I've raised this and it seems it's an unworkableround (is that a word?) problem - see http://tinyurl.com/c4ysfl)

Jeff Paulett said...

I love Google Earth. I have to say that I'm an F1 fanatic but hadn't thought of using Google Earth to check out the circuits. These maps make it easy to find the circuits on the map.