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Thunder Rolls in the Bluegrass State
BILL MOSS BUILDS ANOTHER TROPHY TRACK
By: Marc Jennings
When you settle into your seat for todays race-whether you're
in the stands or behind the wheel-thank Bill Moss for making
the Kentucky Speedway what it is.
What the Kentucky Speedway is, in car racing lingo, is a super
speedway, one of the top arenas for motor sports, but you'd
have to be misfiring on several cylinders not to spot that.
Moss is the guy who designed this place so that every fan in
every seat can see every inch of every race. He's the man who
banked all four turns at 14 degrees, with no two turns alike,
giving you a track where you can really run, Son, if you're
a driver. Bill Moss put 104 garages in the infield and angled
them so that from the stands you can see inside Ôem, watch
the teams get race-ready, be an armchair mechanic. The teams'
semis back right up to these garages and stay there throughout
the event-convenience-plus for you crewmen. Race drivers have
lounges and showers, again courtesy of Mister Moss.
"Each track that I design is an individual track," says Moss in a rumble reminiscent
of Waylon Jennings.
But the road from "Let's build a racetrack" to "Gentlemen,
start your engines" has been a long one. Years ago, about a
baker's dozen of them, Bill Moss crossed paths with Jerry Carroll
at the Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth. Carroll, of course,
is the driving force behind the Kentucky Speedway. He's a co-owner
and the guy who took what he likes to call a "$152 million
gamble." Some gamble.
Breaking Ice Then Ground
Anyway, there they were, Moss and Carroll, and the two got
to talking. Moss, you see, has also designed a few other racetracks.
The Las Vegas Motor Speedway, for instance, and Talladega.
"We hit it off," Moss says. "I guess you could call it a chemistry."
So when Jerry Carroll decided to build the Kentucky Speedway,
he hired Bill Moss to design it and coordinate construction.
That's not just the track, my friend, although this screamer
of a tri-oval is sure enough a star; that's everything-the
luxury suites, the grandstand seats, the medical center in
the infield, the safety stations on Pit Row. He specified plenty
of pit stops for the patrons. He handled the architectural
end, and he brought in Viox & Viox, a Northern Kentucky engineering
contractor, for sanitation and water workings. Lighting is
by Musco by order of Moss, who considers the company the world's
specialist in auto track lighting. Wherever your eye falls
at the Kentucky Speedway, Bill Moss's fell first.
Build the Best
What it came down to was that Carroll asked Moss to build him
the best track he knew how to build.
"Jerry's mandate to me was, Ôyou're the expert,'" Moss says. "We've given him
the finest mile-and-a-half track in America."
But it's a pretty good bet Jerry Carroll knew that's what he'd
get. After all, he wasn't the first to ask Bill Moss to create
a top-notch track. Bill France Sr., the Father of NASCAR-the
man who, with his wife Anne, started the organization itself-asked
Moss to build a racetrack at Talladega, Alabama. The first
green flag fell there in 1969.
"He wanted it bigger and faster than Daytona," says Moss.
Faster? Well, according to a story posted on NASCAR's Web site,
on August 9, 1975, Mark Donohue set a closed-course world record
at Talladega with a speed of 221.160 mph. Indy cars finally
caught up with that in 1986 at Michigan Speedway with Rick
Mears driving.
Of course, Bill Moss didn't just hop out of the stands one
day into Bill France's view. Moss had also seen a few races
from behind the wheel.
"I raced when I was young," he says, adding that he ran back in the 1950s, in
the days of such legendary drivers as Buck Baker and Fireball Roberts. "I've
been involved in racing in some form or fashion since the 50s."
An Impressive Track Record
That and college-Purdue, and a degree from the University of
Alabama-gave Moss a foundation for a leap into track construction
and design. And he has worked on some tracks-says it would
take him two days to name them all. But here's a short list.
He redesigned and rebuilt part of the Sebring road course in
Florida. There was a hump in the pavement at Ontario's Mosport
that was causing a lot of wrecks; Moss fixed that. He rebuilt
the Louisville Motor Speedway. When the Indianapolis Motor
Speedway needed repaving, guess whom track officials called?
So whom else would Jerry Carroll ring up?
And what happened when he did?
As Moss tells it, they started looking for a site. Carroll
scouted more than 20, and Moss didn't see them all.
"Jerry knows what he's doing," Moss says.
Yup. This site in Gallatin County fit the geographic requirements,
being close enough to the interstate to handle the traffic.
Work began. Builders reshaped land into a bowl. Little by little,
a track appeared there. Moss says that he was able to design
for expansion, ultimately to accommodate 200,000 people. His
approach, he says, has saved millions of dollars.
Fan and Driver Safety
Money isn't the only thing his approach is designed to save,
though. Moss says two things are paramount when he designs
a track: fan safety; and that the drivers feel safe, so they're
comfortable racing.
Notice the catch-fence. It's designed to keep cars-and stray
parts-on one side and fans on the other. It reaches up to 22
feet above the racing surface and extends eight feet out over
the track.
Notice the crash wall. There's no opening in it. Any necessary
emergency vehicles come through the infield-access tunnel.
Moss says that crash walls with openings can cause wrecks.
He tells of one with movable barriers that moved, all right,
and cut a car clean in two. Amazingly, the driver walked away.
Beyond that, this is a track made for punch-it, hard-running
racing. You're looking at a specially designed asphalt mix.
It's tough. Hard. It reduces stripping and marbling. It's strong
enough not to displace. There are three layers of it, each
an inch-and-a-half thick, four-and-a-half inches total. As
you might guess, this stuff ain't cheap.
Under the asphalt is a foot of rock base. Beneath that is what
Moss called "special improved substrate," and under that is
a filter blanket to keep ground water from coming up. That's
some pretty serious pavement.
Bank on Excitement
And those are some pretty serious turns. They're all at 14
degrees, but you don't hit the full banking at the same spot
of each. In turn three, for example, you're nearly through
before you get to 14 degrees. But turn four . . . that one's
14 degrees all the way around. Drivers, Moss says, can do anything
they want to do there.
"The secret to good racetrack design is transitions into and out of the banking."
That calls for knowledge of such fine points as friction coefficients
and G-forces. Each track is hand-designed, Moss says; there
are no computer programs for this.
What can we expect to see, speedwise, at the Kentucky Speedway?
Well, an Indy car has already topped out at 209 mph here. Moss
guesses that Winston Cup speeds could climb to 185 mph, and
Indy Racing League speeds might reach 230.
Whew.
Time now to test the engineering, the instincts, the reflexes
and the knowledge. Time to take on that banking and those transitions.
We've arrived at race day, and you've come to a place made
for appreciation of the fine art of motor sports. Out on the
track, blasting from turn four toward that checkered flag,
somebody's gears, talent and nerves are going to mesh.
"A driver's going to win it," Bill Moss says, "not necessarily a car."
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