Portions of Spring Mountain track to get resurfaced

The act of recycling comes in a variety of forms, that being paper, aluminum cans and many other materials.

With that said, a demonstration at the Spring Mountain Motorsports Ranch on Pahrump’s far south end of town took place last week where an assemblage of officials in the road paving industry gathered for a presentation regarding pavement recycling, using what’s known as reclaimed asphalt pavement, or RAP.

Also on hand were officials from Pahrump’s Wulfenstein Construction, as the company, along with Pavement Recycling Systems/RDO Integrated Controls, out of California, and the Japanese corporation, Topcon corporation, are preparing to expand the track, according to Wulfenstein Construction’s Chris Ross.

On track for expansion

Ross noted that Wulfenstein Construction is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Pavement Recycling Systems holdings, and a sister company to Pavement Recycling Systems.

“The demonstration is a small piece of a project that has been in the planning stages for several years,” Ross said. “The vision of this project is to grow this into the largest road track in the world. There will be expansion that will be happening on the north and south side of the facility, and eventually when that new track is in place, we are going to repave some of the existing track.”

The right mix of ingredients

Ross also said the project initially started out as a mix design project, which is defined as the process of selecting suitable ingredients of concrete and determining their relative proportions with the object of producing concrete of certain minimum strength and durability as economically as possible.

“As you can imagine on a racetrack, there are certain characteristics that race cars have that need a certain type of asphalt they have to travel on,” he noted. “We have been working diligently to come up with a mix design with some of our industry partners to do some extensive testing to get a very strong and easily cured mix to begin with, that doesn’t turn brittle.”

High tech

Wulfenstein Construction Manager Bryan Wulfenstein said the intelligent paving project demonstration involved the latest and greatest technology to pave the track.

“We are using recycled asphalt that we actually pull off the track itself,” he said. “We take it to our plant and crush it down. We also check for oil content and then we actually incorporate that into the new. About 15 percent of the actual mix that’s coming to us is recycled material. In terms of cost, this asphalt will be a break-even thing. The amount of recycled asphalt that you add into it covers the cost of the additional oil that we are putting into it to get rid of what is called air voids inside the asphalt itself.”

Beyond the track

Additionally, Wulfenstein said the same technology could possibly be used in the town of Pahrump proper.

“It eliminates the long duration of road construction projects,” he said. “A lot of times, the projects we have done in town take anywhere from two to six months to rebuild a two-mile section of road. What this does is you can go through and actually do the milling of it. You can create the mix and within two days you can do a mile of newly paved road, as opposed to a much longer time with the other method.”

Ryan Zenahlik, technology specialist for Pavement Recycling Systems, noted that the intelligent paving and variable milling process was made possible by Topcon’s new SmoothRide solution at the facility.

“The material is very durable, and we realize that we need to build a product that these customers can use for a long period of time,” he said. “Some of the technology that we have been running out here has been around from four to six years.”

More to come

Zenahlik also noted that future development at the facility will likely begin within the next couple of months.

“I don’t know how much we will be doing right away, but I think it’s going to be a continuing process over the next year or so,” he said. “We can usually do about 35 to 40 feet a minute. It’s not about production when you are using technology all the time. It’s mostly about consistency. We invited other users from all over North America. We have Canadian customers as well as customers from Minnesota and North Dakota. These are primarily paving contractors who are interested in not only the equipment and the recycled material that we use for the mix design, but the technology as well.”

Spring Mountain Motorsports Ranch General Manager Dave Petrie noted that plans are in the works to greatly expand the facility, located at 4767 S. Highway 160.

“We are the official school for Chevrolet, basically with Corvettes,” he said. “We recently purchased an additional 600 acres, and the goal of our owner is to be the longest track in the world. Originally back in 1997, this piece was purchased, so this asphalt here is actually around 23 years old. We’ve also done a few extensions on what we call our west track and our east course.”

Contact reporter Selwyn Harris at sharris@pvtimes.com. On Twitter: @pvtimes