SRCA Dragstrip in Great Bend
By COLE REIF
Great Bend Post
With the SRCA Dragstrip Board of Directors and City of Great Bend coming to terms on a one-year operating agreement last week, the racing season will carry on as normal this year. With the city hiring a pair of attorneys to sort out the complications with a recent resurfacing project, how the dragstrip will operate in the future could be changing.
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Great Bend was awarded funding through the Kansas Department of Transportation Cost Share program to help reconstruct the historic dragstrip west of town. After receiving seven bids, Suchy Construction was awarded the bid for $1.6 million. KDOT provided 75% of the construction costs for projects that invest in transportation improvements statewide. Along with the reconstruction of the dragstrip, Great Bend coupled the project with a resurfacing of most of 10th Street for a total price near $3.4 million.
After completion of the project in May 2021, the SRCA notified city administration that several high spots existed on the track’s surface. Suchy worked to get the track within specifications by grinding roughly 60 high spots. Total Venue Concepts was then hired to professionally polish the surface for roughly $72,000.
Having to grind and polish the track so much has caused the top sealing part of the concrete to come off. SRCA Board of Directors President Arlen Werth said now the track is full of holes.
"When they run that concrete, they pump it," said Werth. "Any time you pump something, you put air into it. Once you take the top off, you start exposing all these air pockets that are in the concrete. If you walk out there and look at it, there's an area from the 1,000-foot mark towards the finish line in the right lane, there's more air pockets than surface."
Holes covering the SRCA Dragstrip racing surface.
Especially now with the holes, SRCA crews are forced to spray the track with additional sticky composite material to create traction for the fast dragsters. Werth said it takes 40 gallons of the compound to spray the track. For weekend races, crews might have to spray the surface a few times, costing the SRCA between $1,000 and $2,000 each weekend just in compound. Each time a dragster races down the track, the tires will pull more material off the porous surface.
Werth added the SRCA is lucky to make $3,000 to $4,000 each race weekend. Rising costs are reducing their budget each year.
“This is squeezing our checkbook to the point that we don’t have anything left,” said Werth. “We started this year with the least amount of money we’ve ever had in probably 20 years.”
The new, one-year contract with the city reduced SRCA’s annual payment of $10,000 to $1 to help defray some of the rising expenses to maintain the track.
Spending thousands of dollars to continually fix a problematic racing surface, the SRCA board members feel the project was not done right in the first place and the proper steps to fix the issues were not taken.
“I’m not an engineer, but I hear a lot of what’s being talked about,” said Werth. “Probably the way to fix it would be to tear it out, start over, and do it the way it was supposed to be done. That was the biggest problem…it wasn’t done the way it was supposed to be done.”
The specifications for a dragstrip surface are detailed and need to be just right. Werth said the state laid out specific guidelines that were not followed when the project began.
“They put a broom surface on the concrete when they were done to help get the water out,” said Werth. “They weren’t supposed to broom it. They said when they drag it, that would take the rough surface off. I know what a drag does and doesn’t do, and I couldn’t see how we were going to drag that rough surface off.”
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When pouring concrete, a screed is used to level and smoothen the surface. Werth said the guidelines stated when the contractor starts to screed the concrete, they are supposed to keep going without stopping until the whole project is done. That didn’t happen.
“They had a vibrator on their screed, that is supposed to smooth the top of it and get the air out,” said Werth. “Every time they stopped, they didn’t shut the vibrator off, so every time they stopped there was a little indention.”
When the SRCA had a professional polisher from Indiana come to perform work on the track, the contractor said the SRCA would be lucky to get five years out the track. He felt the track was too porous, with exposed air pockets or holes, and wouldn’t be able to survive the winters.
“When they grinded that track, they should have grinded it from wall to wall,” said Werth. “All they did was grind the racing surface. Now when it rains, the south track sits with water…it doesn’t drain. I’m not saying there’s a lot of water sitting there, but whatever they grinded is a dip because they didn’t grind the middle down. It’s going to hold water now and guess what happens when the water starts to freeze? It’s going to start popping the top off.”
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The past couple of years of the imperfections of the surfacing project, the added expense to mask the problems and discussing with the city on the responsibility to provide proper maintenance to the track have caused frustration with members of the volunteer-led SRCA Board.
“Our board has been very faithful,” said Werth. “I’m the oldest guy out there. I’m going to be 80 years old this year. We have a harder time finding people to help because we don’t pay help. If we paid help, we couldn’t open the gates because there is not a lot of money in drag racing.”
Running low on funds, Werth said future operating agreements with the City of Great Bend will have to include the maintenance of the track to be handled by the city. Werth said the city is supposed to allocate a certain amount of their annual budget to go toward track maintenance.
“With the amount of money invested recently by the city and the state, this should be a Cadillac of a track,” said Werth. “We shouldn’t have had to do a thing to it for at least five to 10 years. You go out there and there are chunks broke out and it’s not even two years old."