Hi again.

It’s mid-June now, and it already feels like summer is right around the corner.

At this time of year, you can see lots of fruit-bearing loquat trees by the road as you approach The Magarigawa Club. The city of Minaboso, our future home, produces the second largest amount of loquat in Japan, which is biwa in Japanese. “Boushu biwa”, which are a sign of the start of summer in Chiba Prefecture, are just now coming into season.

In this newsletter, we’d like to tell you about the video cameras we plan to use to ensure driver safety on our road course. We’ve finalized our plan of the locations where we will install these special cameras which are essential for managing our road course.

We are planning to install a total of 22 cameras at strategic locations along the course (see photo above). Operators will be able to control camera angle and zoom in to get a closer view, when necessary.

Our main objectives with this project are to ensure that we can closely observe road conditions, detect accidents as soon as they happen, and receive alerts at our control room as quickly as possible. We experimented with a number of camera locations and positions in our quest to eliminate blind spots and make sure that we can monitor the course in its entirety.

We used data collected using the Assetto Corsa driving simulation software to create images of cars passing in front of the cameras at the various locations under consideration.

Around the esses section, one of the unique features of our road course, we are considering installing the camera directly into the curbs.

To watch a simulation lap of our road course created using Assetto Corsa, please click on the link below.

View the first lap: