Racers will return to the Chili Bowl Nationals on Wednesday to a completely different track from the one they left the night before.

That’s because the entire racing surface has been reworked overnight by track prep mastermind Brad "Gravel" Chandler.

While Tony Stewart receives much of the spotlight on race week for tilling the racing surface or driving a water truck around the fifth-mile bullring, "Gravel" has conducted much of the heavy lifting over the past month.



Matt Weaver

With over 15 years of experience in the Chili Bowl and Tulsa Shootout, Chandler oversees the construction of the temporary indoor racetrack each December. He pushes the clay across the expo hall himself and begins constructing the track from east to west in the days leading up to Christmas.

He does so by feel and via the eye test, and you don’t get the nickname Gravel by accident. Chandler consistently produces a similar racetrack year after year without incident, but something hasn’t quite looked right this week.

There have been several incidents in turns 1 and 2, the flip count having already reached 31 through two nights of racing. Chandler said drivers were throwing slide jobs that weren’t totally intentional due to something about the current dynamic of the surface.

However, he just couldn’t quite pinpoint the problem.



So, Chandler reached out to iRacing executive vice president Steve Myers for feedback since the racing simulator platform conducted a laser scan of the Tulsa Expo Raceway back in 2018. Through Myers, iRacing associate producer and pavement racer Kevin Iannarelli delivered the precise measurements of the apexes and banking.

"Throughout the races today and yesterday, we couldn't get the bottom fast enough," Chandler said. "So, I went to Steve and I'm like, 'I need to know what the radius is on the outside.' That way, I have my reference points on the inside with more reference points on the outside."

Every time Chandler builds the Chili Bowl track, he uses three inside reference markers to create the apex using nothing but his experience and feel as the longtime track prep manager. But iRacing was able to provide him a more detailed series of references.

He made immediate use of them.

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iRacing gave Gravel the exact five-point dimensions of both sides of the race track from the company's 2018 digital laser scan and he's marking the corners accordingly before recutting. pic.twitter.com/W4jzLP9iNW — Matt Weaver (@MattWeaverAW) January 15, 2020

"They have every reference point," Chandler said. "Kevin sent us the width from apex to apex with the width from front to back. I took the outside radius to make the outline of the racetrack, and I took the inside radius with our three reference points to make a middle reference."

What they learned is that the 2020 build of the track was missing on average a foot from the bottom groove in turns 1 and 2. Thus, Chandler and crew wasted no time on Tuesday night in marking new reference points and taking a tractor blade to them.

Matt Weaver

How did this happen in the first place? It started with wet clay that was a pain for both Chandler and Stewart from the moment practice laps began on Monday morning.

"We generally mark our three points, step if off and come back to measure," Chandler said. "Then we start to work it in and get the right height and angle. This year, it was so wet that it kept growing. The berm kept getting further and further out there.

"Doing this tonight is going to go a long way towards giving us two-lane racing."

To compensate for the wider bottom lane, Chandler is going to move the outside cushion away from the wall but concedes that drivers will push it back throughout the day on Wednesday.

He hopes to see a much different product than what he witnessed on Monday and Tuesday.

"We can tell from how the races are going with what the issues are," Chandler added. "Normally you can keep the top and the bottom even. We've had days where we drop some water on the top and the bottom, and it's even throughout the race.

"I noticed that drivers were having issues navigating the bottom. In turns 1 and 2, they can come in on the bottom pretty good, but they pushed off the black up into the cushion. So, you saw a lot of slide jobs that weren't intentional."

Jody Rosenboom, racer turned team owner for the weekend, saw what the staff was working on and agreed this should produce positive results.

"If they're moving the inside berm and shortening the distance around the bottom, that's going to open it up more," Rosenboom said. "You saw a lot of racing up top and a lot of slide jobs. You only saw a handful of guys run the bottom because it's the shortest distance, but it didn't come in like I thought it would.

"Because eventually you push that cushion up so high that it's still quicker to stop on the bottom and turn your car, but that didn't happen."

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Follow up to the @MattWeaverAW article about the ongoing work at #ChiliBowl2020 pic.twitter.com/4epZzToiYm — Chili Bowl Nationals (@cbnationals) January 15, 2020

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