Bob Barnard Track Engineering

For a fast sport it is a very slow news day. In the absence of news I will share with you a response from Olaf about the problems of sprinklers:

"- ideally you'd want the water to be applied low at the track surface, so you'd need closely spaced sprinklers with robust heads (embedded in little concrete pits). Never mind the pipe and control infrastructure needed.
- pipe size and amount of water would to a degree depend on how much of an area you want to flood (or wet), and by how much. at the same time weather conditions would also have an impact - you would need more water during summer (when the supply may be low), and possibly less in spring / autumn.
- i suspect you would be talking about quite a large volume of water - easily a few hundred cubic metres. question is where do you get the water from, and where do you store it? could you use the rainwater attenuation system nowadays part of most schemes? something used for test tracks are self-contained systems, whereby the track run-off gets collected in a drainage system and then routed through the storage tank. though you'd always have losses, and would need to top up the system very regularly. not very cost-conscious or sustainable.
- you'd have to probably change the approach to the engineering design - usually we except that under heavy rainfall track operations get suspended for a while, until water clears. with this proposal your drainage collection system would have to work very well at all times, with no standing water, no soil etc being washed onto the track (an issue with sprinklers if slightly misaligned), no sheet flows across the track. again, costs would increase.
- i'd also be concerned about maintenance. if you applied this system say in the middle east, all their drainage infrastructure and operations would have to change - usually everything is just a sand trap after a short while... similar issues apply elsewhere (for instance need to bleed the supply system prior to winter and frost damage).

The whole thing would be rather expensive, and inevitably would also throw up safety questions."

And guess who would be paying, the poor old promoter just like the lights. And placing the sprinkler head so it is not going to be hit would be difficult, I'd be interested to see how tracks have done it so far.