How difficult to clean up after a SX race?

That dirt is 10X heavier taking it out than when it arrived. Can't imagine having to clean up that mess.

I would imagine they have to bring in outside help for that, probably a disaster restoration company. Or send a few buses down to Home Depot on Monday morning.

I know a few of the dirtwurx machine operators. The hardest part is getting up all those mudd covered tuff blocks, the rest isn't too bad since machines are doing the heavy lifting.

I was watching how clean the indoor pits and pit lane footage was on TV, and wondered how that was possibly
enforced.

I would have to assume a promoter couldn't run away with venue chock full of mud and still have a reasonably happy venue operations team.

I worked for one of the supercross promoters back in the late 80's and early 90's before the all sold out the what became clear channel and is now feld.

We ran in the old atlanta open baseball stadium, tampa, memorial stadium in charlotte, miami, and orlando. All these were open stadiums on plywood (except a time or two they went in on the field because they were resodding anyway).

Tear down would start immediately after the night show, or at some events after ams ran on sunday.

First thing was getting everything off the field. Sometimes hay was rented, so they would pick up undamaged bales, signs were reused, penants went in the dumpsters.

Then operators would start pushing jumps into piles, or if it was muddy, they would skim mud off and try to use any dry dirt to build roads that could support dump trucks.

Then they would bring in gradalls or excavators (gradalls were phased out as excavators became common). If there were teeth on the buckets they would weld plates on them for a smooth edge. Normally there would be 4 machines.

Laborers would be brought in, 32 to 48, and split into crews based on how many machines were there.

Each crew had shovelers, sweepers, and stackers. The plywood had to cleaned off as the dirt was scrapped off, including any gaps that opened, so that there wouldn't be 10 or 20 truckloads of dirt left on the field. As the plywood was cleaned off guys would pick up the plywood and put in 50 sheet stacks. It had to be 50, and the had to be reasonably straight so it could be strapped to go on trucks.

If they were stock piling the dirt to use in the future you had to try and get as much of the plastic out of the dirt as it was handled.

This would normally take 18-24 hours straight through, depending on amount of dirt, operators, and breakdowns. It was a slog. Things would get interesting sometimes when you have that many laborers working. There was no drug testing policy, and a lot of the laborers would work 4-6 hours and cash out.

The stadiums would normally clean public areas (concourses, seating, walk tunnels) and promoters would clean access tunnels, the field, and sometimes the pits.

I know a lot of it has changed since then. Dirtwurks has several crews of operators so that construction starts on some tracks while others are being torn down.

Most of the stadiums are domes. Coming off concrete is so much easier.

Getting laborers is probably different. When I stared it was not uncommon to go out and pick up laborers off the street and pay cash. That was ...um... interesting sometimes. In Atlanta we would go the men's shelter and get them. After a show office was broken into they started using employment agencies. About the same quality of workers, except we had their real names if they decided to cut you or whack you over the head.

Dang, I didn't intend to write an autobiography.

Does dirturx contract out the hauling? Seems like there could be some overlap of events when it comes to hauling the dirt since they went to doing amateur day on Sunday but the next track has to be built basically by Friday night.

Same crew of dirtwurx guys built the track in 18 hrs on Tuesday before the rain. And then spent another 20 hrs getting all the mud and roadbase out of there. Majority of their guys do most of the sx series. Which usually is 4 operators and 2 guys putting out the tuff blocks

I worked for gear services (the company that sets up the nationals) last summer and it was a lot of work, nothing too hard or anything, just a lot of work to be done.

For the nationals there is a few special challenges we faced. One was the sheer size of the facilities and getting around them. Moving all the arches and banners around was kinda a pain, considering all we had was some Side by sides to move the stuff.

When the banners, arches or signs got dirty they had to be pressure washed before the next round so a race that was muddy could definitely cause headaches.

I only did 4 rounds last summer but although it was a good work load, it was some of the most memorable moments ever. Something about spending the week at hangtown leading up to the opener had a badass vibe to it.

It is amazing to me how far some of the stuff has come since I worked events. The structures and stuff look intimidating but they have to be so much easier to set up.

An example would be the finish line banner. We had to hang it on pvc uprights. We would anchor the support ropes by digging down to plywood and fastening a 4' 2x4 to the plywood. There would be a small notch cut to run a rope through. They didn't want the banner hung until right before the night show so it would be clean, so we would erect the uprights and have ropes run through eyebolts to pull the banner up, two ropes on each pole, plus one running between them to hold the poles square.

The dang banner weighed about 80 lbs, and was 4' x 20' which caught a lot of wind.

Some stadiums really caught wind and would almost form a vortex. The atlanta Fulton County stadium was about the worst. We went to hang the banner for one event and one of the ropes broke and the entire set up came down. They had to do without the banner for that one. It was the 1990 atlanta supercross, you can youtube it.

Look at the pennants and banners while you watch, plus the 500 hay bales in white trash can liners.

If I still worked events I would hug the tuff blocks in gratitude for not having to mess with all that crap. Sure occassionally a tuff block causes an incident, but so did snagged pennants and haybales. Once a bale got busted it could leave a slick spot in the track for an entire race.

Even the banners and their display. We started out with frames made of 1x4 boards, that would have to be assembled into a frames each event. Banners were stapled on, so after the first time you used them you had hundreds of left over staples to contend with. They would be shipped with the plywood and we would often have a pile of kindling when it arrived at the next venue. In 1990 we built frames out of pvc pipe and fittings. You can see them in that same footage. They wanted as few a frame supports as possible so they sagged and looked pretty crappy. Between all the sponsors v there were about 12 different sized banners plus you would have associatte sponsors at each event like tire stores or restaurants that were always some odd ball size. The tuff block are such an improvement not only in logistics and safety but have had to have helped a great deal in marketing our sport.

Dang, another chapter

It looks like an enormous pain in the ass to clean up

Yes all the majority of the trucking is contracted by outside haulers, and its a very short window as you pointed out. This weekend race try to take a good look at the tuff blocks, they dont have anytime to clean the gear, they are all going to be covered in seattle mud still.

A couple of the other guys touched on it, and are correct. They start pushing all those jumps into piles with dozers and skidsteer. Excavators with large buckets and straight egdes start loading up tri axle dump trucks with the dirt. The plywood base underneath protects the floor/fields, and big sweeper attachments clean up the rest.

People love to point the fingers at tracks layouts, and track builders when a race isn't exciting. However the reality is these guys are spending every hour of their days working their asses off.