Behind the Bricks: Turn 2 Repave, Part 2

DOUG: So we’re about an hour and a half in, and we’ve actually come down to the brick. So we come down about seven inches through several passes of the milling. What’s really cool about this brick, this brick was put in the fall of 1909 and resurfaced asphalt put over in 1937, so it hasn’t seen daylight since 1937 and actually, what’s kind of cool is this thing comes up as the Kai rock, which was the first asphalt put down in 1937. It’s amazing how it just comes right off.

Cox can be mad timing lines. So Matt cut new timing lines when we get ready for May.

There you go. Call for brick. So working at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is actually pretty fascinating the things going on with Tyrone Garrison, who runs all of the facility for us, not just here, but the 1000 acres that we have, including the IndyCar offices. But this has become a passion project for you. Tell us a little bit about what we’ve learned and why we really decided we needed to do this.

TYRONE: Yeah, so after we repaved in 2004 about 10 years later, this bump started forming, and we’ve been grinding and been able to keep up with it over the years just by grinding. But to a certain point, we kind of ran out of room to grind. The subsurface had pushed up enough that we were milling into the intermediate layers of asphalt, which could be problematic. This entire track is moving every day as it heats and cools and go through thermal cycles. But when that happens, at some point, it’s going to find a weak spot and expand. That’s very similar to how you form a mountain range. And if you looked at this series of bumps, it looks very much like you would see a topography of a mountain range, and that’s what we’re experiencing. We got to the point where the brick was deteriorated so much from those forces that it crushed expanded. Now we have to come in. We can’t do the grinding anymore, so now we’re going to remove this, put asphalt into a full depth patch. Now that asphalt will act as an expansion joint, so all these bricks that will remain under the surface in almost every area of the track will have have room to move and expand to the track, so that we don’t experience these bumps in the future.

DOUG: So what we were seeing in the surface of the asphalt was how it was coming up. Is coming up because these bricks along in here are coming apart. I literally just took these out with my hands. But it’s pretty crazy how loose all of this is. But we’re gonna get it fixed surfaces over and try to be smooth again.

So we got the cold crew here right now. Pretty cool here as they’re taking these bricks out, this sand was put on on top of the crushed limestone and tar as a bedding before these before these bricks went on. So this sand literally has not seen daylight since 1909, but as you can see, we’re beginning to take some of these bricks out. I know a lot of you going to ask, what are you doing with those bricks? We’re saving the bricks. Don’t worry. This is so much of our history at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway coming out in those big nine pound chunks of Culver bricks.

So we’re going to have a little bit of fun right now. Cairo is going to dig up, and like Rollo Rivera, we may find something here. And actually what we’re hoping we find is maybe the original surface of crushed stone that actually would have been underneath here. We may not find it, but we thought, why not try? I.