Refurbishment of the Drag Strip at the Qatar Racing Club

After our successful refurbishment of the drag strip at the Bahrain International Circuit we were engaged by the Qatar Race Club in 2008 to refurbish their drag strip. This new untreated concrete track had hills and valleys, large cracks and other issues. We partnered with Penhall Company, the number one company in North America for all things concrete, and began the process in June 2008. The following outlines our trip to the BIC.

Qatar is a booming oil rich Kingdom. This satellite image shows Saudi Arabia to the West (Qatar is a peninsula off Arabia just north of the UAE.

Qatar Racing Club from satellite photograph

Doha, the capital of Qatar is a very fast growing city full of interesting new buildings. Here is a view from across the channel of The Corniche, the new financial hub of Qatar. Few of these buildings existed 5 years ago!

Doha has some fascinating architecture. This is not a mirage, it's twin towers going up near the Doha Ritz-Carlton Hotel.

The Doha Ritz-Carlton Hotel, our base of operations.

The Sheraton in Doha. Very distinctive architecture.

And more buildings going up everywhere.

The Doha Souk.

Here's the 23,500 lb. grinder being offloaded at the track the night of our arrival.

Sunset. Notice the water on the track, we had to wet the track to cool it before we started grinding. It was too hot during the day so we generally started grinding at sunset and went through the night until around 7 AM.

A prettier shot of the same sunset

Here you can see more of the imperfections in the track.

Unevenness

More bad spots in concrete pour.

Closeup of the ground area. Other areas were so low we didn't have to remove much at all.

The slurry truck to capture the ground concrete and water.

Grinding at night

A bolt in the concrete!

Those shiny things are diamonds in the grinding head

The sun comes up while we are still working

Nothing shows the poor condition up as well as the end of the track when we had one last pass to go

This isn't snow in Qatar, just a neat shot of the ground/unground portion.

After the grinding we polished the track with this machine. The finished product becomes smooth as a garage floor. The polisher was also sold to the Qatar Racing Club to maintain the surface in the future.

The new smooth finish.

The finished product. All the equipment shown here was sold by GTS to the Qatar Racing Club.