We don't allow road bikes on our track. They can stop too quickly and create crashes, particularly if there's a mix of track bikes with no brakes. Track geometry is steeper and bottom brackets may be a bit higher to allow more clearance. However, with a 400 metre track your banking should be fairly shallow and you can get away with something lower BB. On that track, you could probably get away with old road bikes with semi-horizontal dropouts, although they might not have enough length to permit you to change cogs much.
Here's a gear chart. As Stumpy said, most male riders use front rings in the 48-51 range. Women often seem to use lower front and smaller rear. Most track riders seldom use a rear cog smaller than a 14. Gearing might look low relative to what you do on the road, but you spin a lot. My son used to do sub 12 second 200s (that's over 60km) on 50/15, or 90 inches. He won a lot of junior national championships and still holds our national junior pursuit record and never used anything bigger than a 92. Track riders here, as they seem to do in Oz, usually talk of gear inches as shown in this chart. They also usually just use the whole number (e.g. 48/14 is usually called 92, not 92.6) Our former best local rider (he moved away a couple of years ago when he joined a higher level team) won two world cups on the weekend and used to do points races in 92. I think he used something like 94 for pursuits. I've read that the Australian pursuit team uses something like 108, but they average over 60 km/hr for 4 minutes so need a bigger gear than the sprinters who would only be going a total of 800 metres, 150-300 hard, on your track.
Gear Chart
Wheel Size 27
44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53
11 108.0 110.5 112.9 115.4 117.8 120.3 122.7 125.2 127.6 130.1
12 99.0 101.3 103.5 105.8 108.0 110.3 112.5 114.8 117.0 119.3
13 91.4 93.5 95.5 97.6 99.7 101.8 103.8 105.9 108.0 110.1
14 84.9 86.8 88.7 90.6 92.6 94.5 96.4 98.4 100.3 102.2
15 79.2 81.0 82.8 84.6 86.4 88.2 90.0 91.8 93.6 95.4
16 74.3 75.9 77.6 79.3 81.0 82.7 84.4 86.1 87.8 89.4
17 69.9 71.5 73.1 74.6 76.2 77.8 79.4 81.0 82.6 84.2
18 66.0 67.5 69.0 70.5 72.0 73.5 75.0 76.5 78.0 79.5
19 62.5 63.9 65.4 66.8 68.2 69.6 71.1 72.5 73.9 75.3
20 59.4 60.8 62.1 63.5 64.8 66.2 67.5 68.9 70.2 71.6
I was going to send you a link to our club's website, which has a description of some common track races. However, the site (
http://www.cbtl.ca) is down - I'll see if I can get it brought back up. I've put together a new, updated version of the list since the one on the site misses a few races. I can PM it to you if you like.
Track is a lot of fun. The atmosphere here is very supportive and since it's a small community everyone gets along well. It's also a good place for kids to get into racing since you don't have the dangers of the open road and since you can get in a lot of races in one evening. Kids can try out different tactics and learn about their abilities.
Sorry that the chart didn't turn out right. It looked fine when I copied it onto my screen. If someone can tell me how to post an Excel sheet with columns, etc. I can fix it.
