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wood

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by wood

  1. Cool. Makes sense. I ain't married to the guy. Just want whatever is best for the team going forward.
  2. Yeah maybe he'll actually get to play CF more now. I was thinking more in the current vein. Cool. They should go get that guy! ; )
  3. Wouldn't go wrong with either of them imho, but I love the idea of Espada taking over.
  4. Yeah, so, any top CFs available out there? Serious question. Also, maybe an unpopular opinion, but it seems to me like we could do a lot worse than keeping Maldy around as a backup/mentor assuming he'd be up for it. Yainer's the man, but he can't catch every day.
  5. Yeah remember back when we were still getting approvals from the City Council and Will Buxton started interviewing people at bars and restaurants in Montreal about the Austin race? That was my idea. I texted him and his crazy-eyes sister about it beforehand. They didn't reply, so I figured they missed the texts or just didn't wanna do it or whatever. Next thing I see is them on TV with Buxton extolling the virtues of F1 etc. They played it up on the website they were running at the time as if it was all their idea. Never even said thanks.
  6. Yeah I remember there was a big article about all the piers they installed. I think it mentioned how deep they went. I'll see if I can find it again. They may have even been floating piers, which seems like a bad idea out there. I just found this basic article, but I think there's another one out there with more detail. Here they say they don't know if they went to bedrock or used spread footings. I know the guy that wrote this. He's a dipshit. https://www.theaustingrandprix.com/news/2011/12/22/december-construction-analysis-of-circuit-of-the-americas.html
  7. Yeah and after spending just a few hours there Friday with very little track action, I was ready to go. Left early to avoid the rush, which I never do. And y'all know I'm a big fan. It just wasn't much fun out there. I'll go back when there aren't so many people. SVRA is fantastic, and WEC will be awesome except that it'll be hotter than the sun.
  8. Krack says the COTA bumps basically beat Fernando's floor into submission ... https://www.motorsportweek.com/2023/10/23/aston-martin-confirm-cause-of-painful-alonso-us-gp-retirement/
  9. That sounds scary. Did they send Rocko to 'have a chat' with you?
  10. I hear ya, and I don't even mind going CR (not red v blue CR) about it here in this thread (I might be the only one tho), because nobody in the CR is interested in the $350+ Million fraud that's been/being perpetrated on the taxpayers of the State of Texas. But I don't blame the contractors. The original contractors and engineers did an amazing job. I knew a lot of them at the team. Where it all turned south is when Bobby cancelled the drainage system maintenance. Then he hired local guys to resurace it for cheap, and they delivered what he paid for. Cheap resurfacing, without fixing the underlying problems. And yeah, of course there are people who are enabling it all from the highest level. Preach to the choir (me)!
  11. There's more to it than the weather and the soil conditions. There's a human element involved, too. A COTA human. I'm sure you can guess who. Check it out in the COTA sucks thread if you don't know what I mean. Basically, that's what Epstein is doing. He's never going to pay for proper repairs, so what he's doing instead is patchwork low-bid repairs whenever MotoGP or F1 complains loudly enough. Then he waits until they do it again and does the absolute minimum to keep them coming back another year or two. I never could find it on my DVR at all. Heard it was on ESPN+ and that ESPN had their own prerace show or some shit instead. The Sky broadcast? That's wild. I also posted about it on the Autosport board, and I'm about 100% sure that Crofty and maybe a couple of other Sky people hang out there too under assumed handles. Other seeing it on a message board, I think the only way to have heard that was on the live stream.
  12. That was Mike Krack's response to my question during the Aston Martin zoom call tiktok live stream they let me take part in last Thursday. IIRC I posted about it here. Did you really hear it on the race broadcast? I missed.
  13. With F1? Not sure. But we passed that point a long time ago with MotoGP.
  14. So, there's a thread about this in the Austin reddit, where COTA threads typically fizzle and die. This one is booming, and there's a guy in there who helped build that drainage system and more. He just confirmed (again) what I've already been told by a few people - that the ACO drain maintenance was indeed cancelled by COTA (Bobby), against the advice of the engineers and even COTA employees at the time (one of whom I know personally), and that led to these problems.
  15. Yeah I have no idea. It's crazy. Here's a photo a local racing photog chick took on pit lane years ago. They were laready measuring the spread back then. No idea what it's like now. (analisa photography or something like that on insta iirc) So wait ... you're in road building? You should be telling us all what's up re: COTA! : )
  16. Do you mean the actual aggregate? I know I I've seen it in an article or two, but I can't remember. IIRC there were different mixes for different layers, too.
  17. Me, or Deft? I've never been in binness with Bobby (as evidenced by the lack of a large gaping fissure where my ass should be).
  18. Oh yeah I think it would probably work pretty well, but too much money. Bobby won't even pay for any decent resurfacing, even when doing only small portions of the track at a time. He ain't paying for that, but according to what I was told, that would be so expensive it would probably crash the business p,an completely.
  19. Bobby says he'll 'fix it', just like he's said before. Says part of the track is 12 years old. Yeah, no shit. But news flash, the problems are all the way around the track, even on a bit that y'all just resurfaced a couple of months ago (T12), and your bullshit low-bid patchwork 'fixes' don't 'fix' anything. Fucking embarrassing. Piers into the ground and concrete slabs? They did put a couple hundred piers in the ground for the pit building and pits, but from everything I've been told by the guys who know a whole lot more than I do about this shit, that would have been prohibitively expensive. Even in the pits, the slabs are spreading despite being on piers. Re: the roads around there, yeah, they're a mess. Every few of years the county comes through & smooths and resurfaces 'em, and then they just go to shit again very quickly. The only roads they give a damn about are the ones that actually serve COTA. Margaret Gomez is fucking her constituents out there every day she stays in office. Re: the soil conditions prior to construction ... The engineers had done extensive soil core sampling and knew about the soil problems. They came up with a great plan and put an engineering solution in place to limit the issues. They dug down as much as 20 feet in places and laid an impermeable polymer barrier, then refilled it all with prescribed, imported road base aggregates, then paved on top of that in a very precie layering process with specialize paving equipment, supervised by an F1/MotoGP track paving specialist. Obviously, the track is built along the side of a hill. A drainage solution was designed to divert rain runoff down the hill - around and under the track and under the water barrier. This way, the engineers sought to create an isolated 'tube' on which the track would rest and which would be made more stable than the surrounding soil by controlling the water content inside it . They designed a robust drainage system which was a critical component of the system. That solution worked very well and kept the track very smooth until 2015, when poor/no maintenance led to failure of the drainage system that's a key component of the soil mitigation solution. Early on, to save money, Bobby had canceled scheduled maintenance that the designing engineers had prescribed for the drainage system. Then when big rain events predictably occurred, the unmaintained drainage system was overwhelmed. Water is always going to find a way downhill, no matter what, so it ran across, under, and even through the now-damaged subsurface barrier ‘tube’. The water moving inside the tube weakened the track base, eroding the substrate and causing subsidence. That created bumps and cracks in the surface. You can see evidence of this during and even days after any significant rain at COTA, as water weeps up from the track base (where it’s not even supposed to be) and out through cracks in the track surface). Now the drainage system needs to be repaired to help stabilize the track's substrate, but in short that's not happening, so the cheaper, superficial fixes (patchwork grinding and lower-grade repaving only portions of the track) only last a few months rather than years.
  20. Damn. Got back from the game last night at 1am. Didn't look at any news, texts, or try to watch the race. Finished the race a little while ago and suddenly found out all the shit that happened since. Got damn. I missed a lot! Bobby says he'll 'fix it', just like he's said before. Says part of the track is 12 years old. Yeah, no shit. But news flash, the problems are all the way around the track, even on a bit that y'all just resurfaced a couple of months ago (T12), and your bullshit low-bid patchwork 'fixes' don't 'fix' anything. Fucking embarrassing.
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