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February 23 2022
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Vol. XXIII • No. 4
“The Nation’s Best Read Construction Newspaper… Founded in 1957.” Your Georgia Connection: Rich Olivier, Atlanta, GA • 1-800-409-1479
The Atlanta Motor Speedway (AMS) has hosted racing events of all types for more than 60 years. But it was time for a change. The racetrack was last paved in 1997, so track officials decided to get radical. Not only did they decide on fresh paving, but also to increase the banking at the track from 24 to 28 degrees, providing the potential for the racetrack to be one of the fastest in the country. The new racetrack will be a little more than 1.5 mi. around and narrower than the previous configuration from 56 to 42 ft. A total of 70,000 to 125,000 spectators will be able to view the races, depending on the layout of the track. While the emphasis at the track is speed, speed and more speed, the emphasis on the rebuild was precision and a deliberate pace. While a normal paving machine might pave 3 mi. of flat road in a day, workers at the AMS were happy to get
halfway around the banked area of the track in a day (approximately 750 tons of asphalt). The reason is that the banking of the track, which makes high-speed racing possible, makes paving work almost impossible. Vehicles of any type that are not traveling at high speeds are naturally pulled downhill by gravity. Workers on the track find it exhausting just standing on the embankment for more than a short time. These problems are nothing new for John Rauer, division manager of Eurovia Atlantic Coast dba as Sunmount Paving. He has supervised the construction of 13 racetracks in his career, including the last paving at AMS. The excavation at the track began shortly after July 4. Rauer gathered his paving team of approximately 20 people to start their piece of the job around Labor Day and finished in early December. Sunmount’s paving team began its rounds with the paving
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machine at the top of the track, held in place by a metal beam anchored to a crane at the bottom of the track. On most days, the pavers and rollers were secured by the crane or a bulldozer, enabling the workers to inch along and build a quality pavement. Workers fed the asphalt into the paver from the crane located at the bottom of the track. “There’s some engineering that went into the process, but much of it was trial and error,” Rauer admitted. “We had to fabricate something new almost every week to make the process better or easier. Even with the paver anchored, the paver would slip sometimes. So, we had to make many adjustments.” After laying down a cement-treated layer at a depth of 6 in., the paving team laid down a 2-in. drainage layer, then see AMS page 6