Especially f1 or carting tracks
In: 4
If you’re talking about the stripes that circuits such as Paul Riccard uses in its run-off areas, it’s an safety improvement of gravel traps: it’s hard to control a car that goes through gravel, it may end up leaving gravel in the track itself, and sometimes it may flip a car over.
They started to use asphalt run-off areas because it turns out that the best way of slowing down a car is by using its brakes (who knew!), and in the rare instances where a car goes straight through a corner, there’s not much difference between a gravel trap and an asphalt run-off (this is why they use all kinds of protections for the walls, from tire walls to Tecpro barriers).
Now, if the run-off surface is asphalt, drivers are tempted to use it to gain an advantage (something that, with a gravel trap, doesn’t happen). Well, they experimented with “sausage kerbs”, but they were kinda dangerous, being able to launch cars into the air. But they still use rough surfaces so going off track has some kind of “automatic penalty”.
If you want to know more, [there’s a video made by Chain Bear about run-off areas](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N06z6VHXGA), and other ones about [barriers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkpvPWB3jMk), and [helmets](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdwyP2UcCf8).
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