In the lead up to the Singapore Grand Prix 2024, you may have heard former British racing driver, Martin Brundle, on his famous grid walk mention how they had used a water blasting machine on the track as part of the race preparation. If you look closely at that TV coverage, you’ll notice the faint transverse stripes on the asphalt surface made by the water blasting.
That water blasting machine Martin referred to was our Trackjet. Each year, for the past 14 years, Roadgrip Motorsports have treated around 50,000 m2 of the track surface for Singapore F1.
The reasons are two fold and have a significant influence on the nature and atmosphere of the race.
Firstly, being a normal road system for most of the year, there is an accumulation of traffic dirt, dust and ingrained detritus that no amount of conventional road sweeping will remove.
The ground effect of an F1 car can remove it but, as was shown in the very first Singapore F1 street race in 2008, the atmosphere on the pit strait hung heavy with a dusty fog in the aftermath.
The second reason is that under FIA regulations any resurfacing work carried out on a circuit should be completed at least 6 months prior to the event to allow the asphalt to mature and develop adequate skid resistance. Because of the logistical issues involved with this temporary and complex city circuit, any resurfacing can only be completed shortly before the event.
The skilled Roadgrip team operate a variety of Trackjet Hydroblasting systems around the world. These machines incorporate high tech pressure washers delivering water to the surface through 100 tiny sapphire jets the size of a human hair – and at twice the speed of sound!
These jets clean out the texture of the surface to remove the ingrained dust and debris. In the case of the freshly laid asphalt, they also remove the surface film of bitumen to increase the texture depth of the surface and expose the macro texture and the micro texture of the aggregate.
This extraordinarily powerful machine can be likened to a surgeon’s knife. Potentially capable of removing a surface completely but, in the right hands, capable of extreme precision to deliver the required results.
All of this behind the scenes work helps us to help our client to deliver a cleaner, safer and more exciting race.
Post-race, there is a third reason for deploying the Trackjet to this circuit. Once the race is over, there is the process of returning the circuit back to city streets. The many thousand square meters of branding we helped to apply over the previous month has to be removed, the edge lines have to be blacked out and the conventional road markings reinstated.
There’s no time to waste! Our Trackjet and paint teams return to the circuit as the champagne is being sprayed on the podium, blacking out the track edge and removing the red and white kerbs and the branding within hours. Everything is returned to normal city life… until 2025 when it all starts again.
See the video of our Trackjet in action here: Roadgrip LinkedIn
See the full Singapore F1 GP project here: Singapore Grand Prix 2024