I don't get how this happens so often. Cota, Silverstone, and now misano. Do they not let the asphalt cure/settle long enough before letting vehicles on? is it poor workmanship?
I can partially answer this one, as the company I work for was part of the Silverstone 2019 resurfacing, to fix the issues from the 2018 resurfacing... and we also were part of the Singapore GP resurface also last year... so I have a bit of knowledge about it... a lot of my friends ask me about COTA, but I don’t decide if we’re involved or not
Basically, the “traditional” way to fix asphalt, is what is called a “mill and fill”, you mill the top 2-4 inches of asphalt off, place new asphalt over it, compact it down.... done, now you have a smooth road or track.
Problem is, that doesn’t take account into the bumps, dips, cracks in the asphalt, you just pave over it, so everything just becomes smoother. If you’ve ever driven on a freshly paved road, you’ll notice it’s smooth, but still you can feel the waves under it.
The better way, and this is where my company comes in, is we scan the road (or in this case the track), and we take that data and develop a milling plan, so it’s variable, 1/2” here, 2” there, always adjusting... that way at the end, you can either do a basic paving and compaction, or if you want it really smooth, you scan the milled surface again, then take that same data into the paver to do variable depth paving.... then if you really want to get fancy, you can move that data over to the compactors to make sure the pass counts of compaction are correct....
