The Hindu Business Line : Brick and motor!

It was drizzling lightly when we set out for the legendary race tracks of the world, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Unlike many other tracks, this Speedway is situated well inside the city. From the city roads we could see the tall imposing metal grandstand, which can host over two lakh spectators.

Straight from the road, we passed through the tunnel below the grandstand and the tracks to the infield. We were welcomed by a proudly standing building, the Hall of Fame museum, inscribed with the words “Racing Capital of the World.”

We started with the specially-scheduled grounds tour where the bus takes us around the 2.5-mile oval. The host started narrating a brief history of the track as the bus negotiated the quarter-mile turn banked nine degrees and 12 minutes.

Finally, the tour bus came to a halt on the main straight just before the start-finish line thus giving us a chance to hop out on the tracks.

The five-eighth mile straight is separated from the pit area by a double pit wall. The outer edge of the track has a steel reinforced concrete wall with a removable debris fence. In addition, at all four turns SAFER (Steel And Foam Energy Reduction) barrier is installed.

Thus when a car hits the wall at high speed, the energy is dissipated along a large portion of the wall reducing the severity of a crash. The track is surfaced by asphalt and smoothened by “Diamond-Grinding”.

Down the racing lane

The track opened way back in 1909 as a 2.5-mile oval and was then surfaced with crushed tar and rock. Cars raced in the counter-clockwise direction probably to follow the direction of American horse-racing. With four fatalities and numerous accidents during the first weekend race, the entire track was paved with over three million bricks, earning the name “The Brickyard”.

In 1911, on the Memorial Day weekend, the first Indianapolis 500, a 500-mile race consisting of 200 laps, was held which still remains the most famed and signature event of the speedway.

The track was in a terrible state of disrepair during the Second World War and was brought back to shape by the 1930s Indy 500 winner Wilbur Shaw. With more emphasis on safety, the brick pavement was paved over with asphalt leaving a yard-length section of bricks at the start-finish line. This yard length of bricks, left untouched for years, runs across the track to the stands and to the infield bagging the name “yard of bricks”.

During the 1960s, Formula One heros Graham Hill, A.J.Foyd, and Mario Andretti competed in the Indy 500. In 1994, NASCAR was added and a new road course was built inside the infield for the 2001 Formula One race. With F1 disappearing from the 2008 calendar, MotoGP rolled up. I could see workers adding a four-turn course at the first turn of the oval for the Motorcycle event.

The bus took us to the infield and went past Shell’s all-inclusive gas station. It has totally 12 stations to pump racing gasoline for stock cars, unleaded racing fuel for F1 and methanol for Indy cars. Chevy pickups, which are the official vehicles used to manage the race and also to pick up debris on the track during the NASCAR races, were parked too.

The tour bus rolled to a stop near the pit buildings. Beside the track, above the paddock, stands the 10-storey Japanese-style pagoda, which houses the timing and scoring crew, radio commentators, hospitality suites, race officials and other dignitaries. Nearby stands the media centre for the international press.

Race track of the world

At the ground floor of this three-floor media centre is the Economaki Press room named after the father of motorsports journalism for his enormous contribution to racing. After any race, drivers give the post-race conference in this room. Back then, Chris Economaki used to occupy the front row and was the only reporter to use a type-writer instead of laptops.

The top-floor hall is surrounded by glass and gives a full view of the entire tracks. It has lots of chairs and desks for the press with about 120 televisions, hung from ceiling. It shows real-time the race broadcast, while the press sits down with their laptops to jot down the proceedings. Each desk has been provided with network ports and electric plugs for both European and American pins.

Twenty-one cameras along the 2.5-mile oval can zoom in and search for debris to a scale as less as 1mm. A separate crew sits in a room with each television marked for a particular camera position. To illustrate the resolution of the cameras, the host claimed that it can search for a wrist watch anywhere on the track and show its second hand ticking on the television screen.

The glass tower pagoda was the next. The glass, which was shipped from England, acts both as a structural feature and an active sound insulato.

Besides it are the hospitality suites. A small square yard inside the suite on the second floor can be bought for $100,000 for a single race.

They have a power backup generator and a backup for that generator which can run continuously for 48 hours. The second floor of the pagoda just above the start-finish line is the timing and scoring area. The timing instruments are permanently set underneath the start-finish lines and whenever any race happens the race officials have to just plug in and plug out.

As a backup, they also have a photovoltaic sensor running across the track which can identify the car crossing the finish line. These data are transmitted to the satellite and received inside the pagoda room in a fraction of a second. As an additional backup, they also have two men at the final turn to note the car positions on a piece of paper.