NASCAR believes its new track-drying system will dramatically reduce the length of rain delays and could spread across all of motorsport.
The series has recently used jet dryers based on jet engines mounted on trucks, one of which was famously hit by Juan Pablo Montoya during last year’s rain-delayed Daytona 500.
For 2013 NASCAR will switch to a compressed air system that president Mike Helton is confident will radically cut the time needed to dry rain-hit tracks.
“What I declared to our team a couple years ago is let’s change the way we do it, let’s innovate, let’s get a system, and the goal is to improve it by 80 per cent,” he said.
“So that means if we’re drying Daytona off, where it usually took two and a half hours, we get it down to 30 minutes. That’s the goal. And we’re real close.
“It uses compressed air as opposed to a jet engine. It’s designed to expedite the removal of water using compressed air and heat, where the jet dryers were simply designed around blowing and depended more on hot air.”
Helton foresees other categories swiftly adopting the compressed-air technology.
“It’s going to be a spectacular thing, and all auto racing will benefit from this as we go down the road,” he said.
Source: http://www.iracing.com/inracingnews/nascar-news/nascar/nascar-slashes-rain-delays-for-2013
Jeremy Allan Mayfield James Christopher McMurray Casey James Mears Juan Pablo Montoya Joseph Francis Nemechek III
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