KANSAS CITY, Kan. – Kansas Speedway President Pat Warren entered his track's media center Saturday morning carrying an iPhone and the confident look of a prosecutor poised to deliver a closing argument.
The smartphone's photo app displayed a picture of a 3-by-5-inch hole that had sprung at the apex of Turns 1 and 2 after a full day of Sprint Cup practice Friday afternoon. Warren showed it to any reporter who was interested, and it was accompanied by a polite but firm defense of why Sunday's STP 400 will be the last NASCAR race on the 1.5-mile speedway's original coat of asphalt.
"The best analogy is I had open heart surgery last fall," Warren said. "I looked fine on the outside, and people who saw me at the fall race didn't notice anything different. But the doctors told me I had a heart valve that was failing. If I didn't fix it, I might not be here today..
Many NASCSR stars are asking this weekend whether Warren's track will be better off for it when it reopens in October during the Chase for the Sprint Cup with fresh pavement. After more than a decade of harsh winters and degradation that has caused the surface to slide while developing "seams" in the turns that require constant patching, parent company International Speedway Corp. decided it was worth the multimillion-dollar investment to prevent the possibility of a PR disaster akin to the pothole that caused a two-hour delay in the 2010 Daytona 500.
The repaving job will include the addition of variable 20-degree banking (up from 15 degrees), which has been a hit at Homestead-Miami Speedway since it was introduced in a 2003 reconfiguration that has been hailed as the gold standard of racetrack improvements.
But during preparations the past two days at Kansas (where A.J. Allmendinger captured his second career pole position and will start alongside Kevin Harvick), many still aren't convinced Kansas needs to be redone. It's become a familiar refrain with more than half the 22 tracks on the Cup circuit having been repaved in the past 10 years — often to the howling of drivers who fret that their cars grip the new surfaces too well, reducing the side-by-side action and passing that is sold as the essence of stock-car racing.
"I don't really understand why they are paving this racetrack," said Jeff Gordon, who won the first two races at Kansas in 2001-02. "It looks great. This place is awesome. I wish they wouldn't touch it. (But) I'm not the business person. I'm not an engineer that looks at the construction, foundation (and) all the things that they feel like why they need to do it.
"Whatever they put in front of us we will just go about it the best way that we can. I feel like ISC has gotten enough information and experience paving race tracks that I have faith they can do the right thing. They did a great job at Homestead. … What they have here is going to be hard to improve. It's a great racetrack."
Carl Edwards, who hails from Columbia, Mo., also doesn't want any changes to the track he considers his Holy Grail, having vowed his first win at Kansas would mean more than a Daytona 500 victory.
"I wouldn't resurface tracks ever if it were up to me," he said. "I'd patch the holes and keep on running.
"There are so many different things that NASCAR and our sport has to manage and I know no one wants to sit through a delay while they fix a hole in the track. I understand that we have to address those things, but I am a racer that likes to race on a bumpy, rough, slick race track with the cars sliding all over the place. I don't care if there are 20-foot long patches of dirt in the middle of the race track, I'm happy."
Driver input also is a source of some friction in the repaving debate. Though NASCAR has become more proactive in soliciting the opinions of its competitors when consulting with tracks about resurfacing, there still are instances in which drivers are displeased with the results.
In the wake of plummeting attendance the past two seasons since a repave, Bristol Motor Speedway will announce an overhaul next week of its high-banked concrete, and it's hard to find a driver who has been consulted.
Gordon and Hendrick Motorsports teammate Jimmie Johnson both said they arrived at Phoenix International Raceway last November and were perplexed by how the track handled its resurfacing.
"A lot of other tracks, NASCAR has held a meeting in the truck on a race weekend and brought in the paving crew and engineers that are designing it and laying it out," Johnson said. "I've sat in on a lot of those meetings, and it felt like my voice has been heard.
"But the one that caught me off and a lot of drivers off guard was the repave at Phoenix. When we came back it was a far different race track than what we had talked about. I guess that's their prerogative. They're spending the money on the track; they can do what they want."
The main concern from the drivers — a surface that doesn't wear out quickly enough — might not be fixable anyway.
"I don't think there is any way around that," Gordon said. "You can't explain to them that the new technology they are using — it makes the highways smoother and is going to last a lot longer — you can't explain to them why that is not good for racing, because they look at the bottom dollar."
Points leader Greg Biffle, a two-time winner at Kansas, said he was disappointed to watch the track redone, but "we have to keep the racetrack in good condition where it's not coming apart during a race … and not have something happen like what happened at Daytona."
Daytona International Speedway was repaved before the 2011 season, and the ultra smooth surface resulted in the unexpected rise of two-car tandems, which NASCAR took steps to nullify this year through rules modifications after fans voiced displeasure.
Defending Daytona 500 winner Matt Kenseth said he's not sure Daytona will return to its slick, gravelly surface pre-2011 "in my lifetime," and that might affect the quality of on-track action.
"All the racing seems to be better when the pavement wears out and this new stuff doesn't do that," he said. "We've all talked about it before, it would be cool if you could pave it and it's already wore out, but nobody has figured out how to do that. "
Warren said the track considered that option but deemed it infeasible.
"It's like a bad coat of paint," he said. "If you have asphalt that lives two years instead of 12 or 20, you're just creating conditions that caused it to fail in the first place. It's a Catch-22 because it might work for a year or two, but then you just have to fix it again."
An hour after his iPhone photo display, the president returned to media center with more physical proof — the offending chunk of asphalt that shook loose Friday. Holding what looked like a moon rock, he made one more case for redoing his track.
"If you look at it and drive it, it looks fine and doesn't look like it's ready to fail," he said. "But the engineers say if we don't fix this thing, we're taking a chance with driver safety as well as the fundamental business we run.
"At some point, we'll have a catastrophic failure, and the hole will be 3 feet instead of 3 inches. You might not recover from stopping a race for that."
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