How to draw a race track on a real map (and why Google My Maps doesn't work)

At some point, everyone who loves circuits has the same idea: open Google Maps, find your neighbourhood, and draw a race track through it. It is a completely natural instinct — the satellite imagery is right there, the streets are right there, and Google even provides a drawing tool. So you open Google My Maps, click "Add line," start tracing… and within about four minutes you understand, viscerally, that something is wrong. The thing on your screen is not a race track. It is a jagged wire.

This article explains exactly why that happens — the specific, technical reasons My Maps and Google Earth cannot draw a circuit — and then walks through the workflow that actually works, on the same satellite imagery, for free. If you arrived here mid-attempt with a half-finished polygon on your screen: you did nothing wrong. You were just handed the wrong tool.

Why everyone tries Google My Maps first

Because it deserves credit for what it is. My Maps is free, it runs in a browser, it sits on top of the best satellite imagery most people have access to, and its line tool genuinely lets you click points on the world and connect them. For its intended jobs — marking a hiking route, plotting delivery stops, sharing "here's where we're camping" — it is excellent. The problem is that a race track is not a line on a map. It is a geometric object with width, curvature, and physics, and My Maps has no concept of any of the three.

Failure mode one: a track has width, a line does not

A racing circuit is a surface, typically 10 to 15 metres wide for cars, and the width is not decoration — it is the raw material of racing. Width determines whether two cars fit through a corner side by side, whether an alternative line exists, whether a passing move is possible at all. We've written before about how Monaco's narrowness defines everything about it. My Maps draws a stroke of constant pixel thickness that has no relationship to real-world metres. Zoom in and your "track" is thinner than a bicycle lane; zoom out and it's wider than a motorway. There is no way to say "this straight is 12 metres wide and this corner opens to 15," which means there is no way to reason about the single most important resource a circuit has.

Failure mode two: corners are curves, and My Maps only draws straight segments

Every click in My Maps places a vertex, and the tool connects vertices with dead-straight lines. Real corners are continuous arcs with entry, apex, and exit geometry. To fake a smooth hairpin in My Maps you need twenty or thirty clicks, and the result still reads as a polygon — because it is one. Worse, the fakery destroys information: corner radius is what determines cornering speed, and a chain of straight segments has no radius to measure. Your beautiful sweeping Turn 1 and your ugly kinked chicane are, to the software, the same object. A proper track tool fits a smooth spline through your waypoints, so three clicks produce a real curve with a real, measurable radius — and the corner you drew behaves like the corner you meant.

Failure mode three: no analysis, so no answers

This is the deepest problem. The entire reason to draw a track on a real map is to answer questions. What lap time would an F1 car do around my neighbourhood? Is this corner flat-out or a second-gear hairpin? Where would anyone overtake? Would this layout even be fun? My Maps can tell you the length of your line, laboriously, and nothing else — because it doesn't know your line is supposed to be a race track. There's no vehicle model, no speed calculation, no corner detection. You finish your drawing and you have learned nothing except that drawing was hard.

Google Earth's path tool, the usual next stop, is marginally better — it measures more gracefully and drapes lines over 3D terrain, which is genuinely pleasant to look at — but it shares every fundamental limitation: no width, no curvature, no physics. It is a better ruler, not a track designer.

The workflow that actually works

What you want is a tool built for exactly this job: tracing circuits on real-world imagery with track geometry and vehicle physics underneath. Here is the whole workflow in RaceTrackDesigner, which is free and runs in the browser you're using now.

First, go where the track goes. Search any address, city, or place on Earth — or use your current location — and switch to satellite view. This is the same class of imagery you were using in My Maps, so nothing is lost; you can see every street, car park, and field.

Second, click your waypoints. Each click drops a point, and a smooth spline is drawn through them automatically. Corners take three or four clicks, not thirty. Drag any point to reshape; double-click to delete; toggle straight-line mode for genuinely straight sections like a main straight. This is the step that feels like the My Maps experience you wanted and didn't get.

Third, close the loop. With three or more points placed, press C and the circuit completes. This is the moment the tool stops being a drawing app: the layout gets analysed. You get an estimated lap time, a corner count, speed zones painted in colour along the track (so you can see at a glance which corners are fast and which are crawls), braking zones, and a character rating for the circuit.

Fourth, make it real geometry. Drag the width handles to set track width per segment in actual metres — squeeze the street section, open up the stadium section — and watch the analysis update live. Add runoff, kerbs, even a pitlane. Switch the physics between F1, GT3, MotoGP, NASCAR, IndyCar, Go Kart, and WRC and see how the same streets produce utterly different laps.

Fifth, take it with you. Press S for a share link that encodes the whole design, or export as GPX, KML, or XML. The KML route closes the loop with Google in the best way: you can open your finished circuit in Google Earth and fly around it in 3D — using Google's tools for what they're actually great at, which is looking at things, not designing them.

When Google's tools are the right choice

Honesty requires this section. If you need to drop a pin, share a meeting point at a race weekend, measure one distance, or plan where to stand at a rally stage, My Maps and Google Earth are exactly right and you should use them. They are superb general-purpose map tools. The mismatch only appears when the thing you're drawing has geometry that matters — and a race track is nothing but geometry that matters. Use the general tool for general jobs and the specific tool for this one.

The itch that sent you to Google Maps — what would a circuit through these streets be like? — is a genuinely good question, and it deserves a real answer, not a jagged line. Trace it properly, close the loop, and find out the lap time. Fair warning from experience: the first answer always leads to a second question, and the second one to a redesign, and suddenly it's midnight and you've built four circuits. If that happens, our guide to what makes a great circuit is the natural next read.