I haven't been to Muncie in a long time. How secure is entry to the grounds? My biggest worry is that Ol' Bubba and some of his buddies will get liquored up and go turn some donuts on this stretch of black gold!! Or his brother Junior will want to try out the new slicks on his hotrod Camaro!! I've seen it happen around here!! All those truck loads of asphalt attract a lot of attention along with the smell and there are guys just looking for that!! I would put armed guards around it until the NATS!!
When they finished the banked oval across the river from St. Louis, they hired the "PHD of Asphalt" from Indy that they touted as the guy who oversaw the repaving of the Speedway and of Daytona I think. It was kind of a rush job to get it finished before the first race on it which was Indy cars in May of that year, but he supposedly blessed it for that event. Then there was a NASCAR Bush series race on it later that summer under a hot sun, and it started to come up in chunks. That was 1997 I think, and since then I think it has been repaved at least once, not long after it had been opened, and that has held up well and drivers tend to like the oddball, egg shaped track with tighter turns #3 & #4 than #1 and #2. it's a drivers track and you have to work for what you get!!
We had the square pad at Buder repaved 5 or 6 years ago with a 2" thick overlay because it had sunk down so far, especially on the north side, that it turned into a giant puddle when it rained. the surface wasn't that bad after about 25 or 30 years and several sealings, but we couldn't get it to drain and still be safe to walk around. The Park department regraded the area along that side several years before, and eliminated the natural drainage that had always been there, and filled in a French drain ( a shallow trench with large rock in it to prevent erosion ) that was by the east circle, and then water has no where to go in a heavy rain. These days, if there is a heavy rain, the whole control line site gets like a swimming pool, and it never used to do that. The deal with the Parks Department was that if the main organizing body of local clubs (GSLMA) would pay for the materials, they would have Country crews do the work. The Parks department was very tight lipped about when the work would be done, and a long time passed when they suddenly did it. I went by that evening or the next day, and I was shocked at what I saw!! You all, I'm sure know what fresh laid asphalt looks like (flat black ) and what it smells like. What we got was several shades of gray and I could not smell any odor like fresh asphalt!! They had used all reground material from some other project and was not mixed with virgin material at all, was put down cold and rolled with a sidewalk roller!! The roller wasn't equipped with anything to keep it clean while rolling and gravel accumulates on the edges and there were groves from that along one side. there was no compression of the aggregate at all. you could see the gravel clearly, and you could stand a quarter in the cracks around the gravel at almost any point and the top of Washington's head would disappear!! I convinced the members of the club that this was about as crappy a job as could be done, at the price of around $15,000, but figuring there would be no way that it would be redone, we spent the extra money to seal it before cooler weather moved it. It started to crack that first year and we sealed the whole pad again a year or two after that and that's all that's holding it together. It looks OK, but is starting to crack more. it wouldn't be that way if done correctly. The original square pad was done correctly!! No one knows who ordered it, at least I couldn't find out at the time. it was a donut circle before that. Sean and I went down to fly one evening and it was all excavated out into a square, and was pretty deep!! The Parks department had been trying to hold concerts and festivals there around that time and my first thought was some sort f parking lot, but way too small. The next trip there saw it graded out, and about 6 or 8 inches of compacted gravel was put down. The next trip saw a 4 inch layer of asphalt laid down east to west but wasn't rolled very smooth with lots of ridges, and i was concerned about that!! Then the next trip had the last layer put down north to south that brought it up to about 3" or 4" above grade and was baby but smooth !! if any of you remember that may have flown there remember that far back, that's how far it has sunk in 25 or 30 years!! it's old river bottom from when the Meramec River ran over it ancient times. But since it was done correctly in the first place, it's surface held up and wasn't cracked nearly as bad as this "new" paving job.
I hope that the AMA gets their monies worth out of this, or it comes with some sort of warranty, because if a pad of this size presents it's problems and I'll bet it cost a bundle in this day and age. I'm glad to see it, and some of the other disciplines will benefit from it also Just keep those Indiana Hotrod Hoosiers off of it for the foreseeable future!!
Type at you later,
Dan McEntee
Topic: 2024 F2 World Championships - the silver lining (Read 12784 times)