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.