Darlington to be gentle? For a little while, at least

Jason Burns has set up a temporary office in the credential building across the street from Darlington Raceway, the oldest major speedway on the NASCAR circuit. The engineer on site for Sunmount, the Texas company charged with repaving the egg-shaped oval, has only to look out the door to appreciate the significance of his company's latest project.

"There are a lot of people over there, and this track is their life," he said. "The last thing we want to do is change something for the worse. I completely want them to be satisfied, and I completely want us to be the people to go to when you need to get a track paved. So absolutely, it's always in your mind."

Darlington to get $10 million in changes

The oldest track on the Nextel Cup circuit will undergo a major facelift in the fall of 2007.

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Sunmount is no stranger to racetrack repavings, having laid new asphalt on a number of Nextel Cup venues ranging from Lowe's Motor Speedway to Richmond International Raceway to Talladega Superspeedway, the corporation's most recent finished project. But Darlington is a different animal, a place where the texture of the racing surface -- that abrasive, sandpapery blacktop that's been in place for more than a decade -- plays as much a role in the outcome as the configuration itself.

The place and its race-the-racetrack quality have become favorites of drivers and fans alike. Yet parts of the asphalt have worn to the point where track officials have been forced to put down patches, necessitating the need for a total facelift. That officially began on Wednesday, when track president Chris Browning used a backhoe to ceremonially knock down the retaining wall above what will become the new Turn 3 tunnel. The project is slated to be completed by Nov. 30.

It's tricky business, laying smooth new asphalt on top of rocky old stuff that's become part of Darlington's somewhat infamous reputation. Some day after the current effort is finished, the aggregate may very well bubble to the surface, and the Lady in Black may once again begin to resemble the tire-eating track of today. But in between, there's going to be a transition phase, one everyone will have to get used to.

"You wind up in a difficult spot," said Martin Flugger, the engineer overseeing the whole project. "You have a very unique surface with a positive texture with all this aggregate that sits up above that nice even plane of the track. It acts almost like a piece of sandpaper. It's very abrasive, and it wants to wear the tires. When you go back and pave a track, you end up with a lot of negative texture. You wind up with texture that's down into the surface of the track as opposed to above the surface. By no means will it be the same kind of abrasive nature when we're done. You can't pave it that way."

Simply put, there's no way to put down a new surface that replicates the characteristics of the old one.

"As far as mimicking the asphalt itself, it's not really possible," Burns said. "You can't instantly age something. I think back to them talking about Chicago at the race last week, and how it's aging and losing grip. At least to my knowledge, nobody's figured out how to accelerate aging and then stop it."

Drivers last week spoke about how six-year-old Chicagoland Speedway is only beginning to come into its own. Sunmount is retracing steps at Darlington, taking aggregate -- the rock that the asphalt will be made of -- from the same South Carolina quarry that was used the last time the track was repaved in 1995. But no one can be sure how long it will take Darlington's new surface to age, or what the end result will be.

"Will it ever get back to the condition it is today? I won't know until we go down that road," Flugger said. "The likely answer is we'll see some of the stones start to come up. I don't know if it will get back as aggressive as it is today, but the emphasis is on trying to get the racing competitive from the start through the nature of the track itself."

The last time Darlington was repaved -- the work was done by a company other than Sunmount -- the smooth surface helped Ward Burton turn a qualifying lap of 173.797 that still stands as the track record. Yet the race that followed was chaotic, an event that featured 15 crashes as drivers added a slick, fast surface on top of a track configuration already difficult to handle. The goal now at Darlington is to ensure the quality of the racing, despite changing one characteristic of a track surface so crucial to that end.

For a while, at least, racing at Darlington is going to be different -- less tire wear, less tire management, and different race strategy at a venue where drivers rarely take fewer then four tires on a pit stop. But, Flugger cautions, that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be worse.

"When you go to repave a track, you're trying to build in that insurance that you're going to have a raceable track when you're done. That's not to say it's going to be the same track, the same-looking surface you had when you started the job. It will never look that way when you're done," he said.

"But you're hoping that through the design of the track and everything we've done, when you go back to racing, you'll have the quality that you had before, or better. Maybe it won't be wearing tires, but the racing is there. It's what you're coming to see, passing and people really trying to get around the track and side-by-side and all that stuff. Because quite honestly, to get to the point of extreme tire wear, it likely will not be there, it does not happen that fast."