Work is underway at the Circuit of The Americas ahead of the 2022 racing calendar, with attempts being made to smoothen out the track surface. It's not the first time work at the Texas venue has been undertaken, with the tarmac becoming very bumpy over the decade since the track first opened its doors as a result of the ground underneath settling. Over the next four weeks, workers will repave large sections of the track. The work will include adding 10 inches of concrete to the bumpiest sections at Turns 2 and 10, as well as resurfacing between Turns 12 and 16. In order to help identify the problematic parts of the circuit, COTA authorities teamed up with experts from Texas' A&M University, using 3D mapping and ground-penetrating radar to detect the inconsistencies in the soil.
What's causing COTA's track surface problems?
Leo Garcia, COTA's Vice President of Facilities and Track Operations, has explained why the circuit struggles so much to keep its track surface smooth. "This part of Austin, the county, the soil moves a lot," Garcia told local network KXAN. "We know that's the biggest problem, but why it affected those two particular areas, we don't really know. "They weren't able to determine any anomalies in the soil beneath three to four feet that we could see and address. The easiest solution for us was to reinforce those areas, so that way when we pave on top of it, it's not a weak spot anymore." Garcia suspects that extreme weather events, such as the deep freeze of early 2021, also contributed to the soil contraction under the tarmac. "We also think that the freeze that happened played a major impact in some of it," he said. "By the time MotoGP [and F1] got here, the bump at [Turn] 10 showed itself, where we hadn't seen it before. "We feel that at 10, and at 13 and 14, those bumps happened shortly after the freeze. The result was a surface that attracted criticism during the major races at COTA last fall [Autumn]."
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