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IMSA WEATHERTECH SPORTSCAR CHAMPIONSHIP: ROLEX 24 AT DAYTONA

January 27, 2019

Daytona Beach, Florida

THE MODERATOR: We'll continue our press conferences this afternoon with a couple of IMSA officials. Closest to me is Mark Raffauf, our Senior Director of Racing Operations, and on my far left is Simon Hodgson, our Vice President of Competition.
I'll start with Mark. Mark, obviously a tough day out there for everybody with the weather. Some decisions had to be made. Can you explain the process of making those.
MARK RAFFAUF: Yeah, we have a very solid team in race control, very experienced people. Myself here, I've done two races here that were very similar. A.J. Foyt's win in 2001 was virtually identical. 2003 was the same, with about 23 hours of rain.
We obviously take safety into account primarily and competition secondarily. Secondarily in the competition, we made decisions today based on the information we had available to us on the condition of the track, visibility. A lot of variables have to be taken into account by a lot of different inputs, and we those to do what we did on the best information we had. I feel very confident we treated it well.
The biggest problem at the speedway here is, once the ground is saturated, it's very difficult to remove it from the asphalt, and once the cars can no longer technically compete, we feel it's fairly senseless to carry on. So twice today we made decisions to stop the race and try and use all the resources and the great staff of Daytona International Speedway to, as we say, get the track back, which in other words, is provide a surface that's usable.
And we were very strongly intent on fulfilling the obligation of completing the race if at all possible. And we tried every angle and every possibility we had using all of the hardware, people, and staff that we have to do that, and unfortunately we came up a little short.

Q. Mark, how many jet dryers did you have, and what about the Titan? Did you feel like you had enough resources to try to get the track up?
MARK RAFFAUF: The speedway unloaded the whole garage with everything. We had Jets. We had vacuum trucks. We had what they call the Buffalo sweepers, which are actually the most effective, even today, probably more so for these kinds of conditions of not necessarily trying to dry the track but remove standing water.
I think some of the drivers already referenced, yeah, there are places where there are puddles, no question about it. There's a lot of other places where you can go that there aren't. A lot of that was trying to find the rain line, which in road racing is not always the line that you would expect it to be. So we tried to provide as little standing water on the surface as possible, which primarily is the infield, which is flat, and the bus stop on the back straightaway, which is flat. Those are the places where water will pool and collect and also saturate the ground adjacent to it.
So we used all of those different type things from burning up the grass with the jets to sucking it up with the vacuum trucks to using the Buffalo blower to actually blow it as far off the surface as we could get it.

Q. Zanardi suggested that a couple of corners could use some repaving. Do you agree with that, and do you think that's a possibility?
MARK RAFFAUF: Well, I can't speak for the speedway, but the infield was last repaved, I think, in the early 2000s. I think over time, with the amount of use the facility gets, the surface, the actual aggregate of the surface becomes worn because it's driven on a lot. So certain parts of the track are slippery even when dry. You have oil. You have rubber. You have things that help the adhesion from car type to car type on the road course.
I'm not an asphalt expert to answer that question, but it's been 15 years probably that‑‑ and I know there are certain parts of the track like the inside of the east horseshoe, the main groove of the track is kind of smooth because it's just had a lot of miles on it.

Q. I know it was a disastrous rain, but if you had any idea that was going to happen, is there anything else you could have done?
MARK RAFFAUF: Not really. We had pretty good indication it was going to happen yesterday, and in the past at other events here and other IMSA Weather Tech events, we do a lot of work with great weather services to anticipate not just rain, but lightning and other elements. We have to deal with wind. So we knew it was coming, and it's really a question of how much comes and in what period of time. It kind of came slowly, and then it started building, and as it built, it started coming in at7/10 of an inch an hour. It was quite a load of rain today.
Again, the track itself is fine. The banking is actually not bad because it all runs down, but visibility is another thing, and, of course, this was the first time on new Michelin rain tires, and rain tires tend to throw spray in different ways. That was a new experience for everybody, I think.
But I think overall we knew it was coming. There's not a whole lot you can do about it. You just try and do the best you can with the resources you have, and that's what I feel we did.

Q. The race was officially called with 10 minutes to go, and we were told we'd have an update with 30 to go. What was going through that time period and trying to make a decision? What was going on in race control?
MARK RAFFAUF: When we stopped it the second time, we made a very serious concentrated effort to get the track back. We knew from the first stoppage, under those specific circumstances, about how long that would take, and we felt that the second one, the amount of water had actually increases. So we figured it would take a little bit of time.
We got to around the 2:00 time and kind of made a last decision that probably isn't enough time left to do this correctly and properly, and then there's a process of doing it correctly for you guys to give everybody an understanding of what we did, why we did it, the competitors understanding what needed to be done to end the race correctly, and we went through that process. Simon, you may want to add something to that.
It took a little bit of time to finish those off. We had discussed it upwards of an hour in advance of that of what needed to be done, but we really wanted to make that last effort to try to go back to racing again and finish the race. But by the 2:00 time frame, more or less, five minutes here or there, we just realized there isn't enough time left to deal with what we had to deal with physically on the racetrack.
SIMON HODGSON: Yeah, I'd like to add to what Mark has said. Very challenging couple of days, obviously, especially for the drivers, the teams, but also for IMSA as well. A lot of changing conditions, a lot of mixed inputs we were receiving from the teams based on where they actually were in the competition at the time.
We're cognizant of the fact this is a special series because it's an endurance racing series. We race in a lot of differing conditions. But safety is a priority. Obviously, the level is what level is appropriate, seems to be an appropriate risk. We're doing all we can to take inputs from everybody.
Sometimes it appears those inputs may not be correct depending on where you are actually in the class position at the time. I think you heard Augusto say there that, when it went red, they thought they'd lost the race. We're very cognizant of that fact, especially when we implement certain race procedures. You saw in GTD the class leader chose to pit, and he went from being the leader to the back of the class. So we're very cognizant of our communications and the effect that it may have on the overall competition, and the reality is we don't want to be driving the outcome, the end result of the race.
So we were looking to try and get the race in. It became very obvious that, because of the way that the weather was moving and increasing, there may be a potential, but we also realized we had to finish some of the race procedures. We certainly didn't want to enter a process whereby maybe we restarted in the yellow, did those procedures, and then ended. Because if at that time, after freezing the race, somebody had gone off the track‑‑ could have been the leader‑‑ then we would have been set to answering questions as to why we altered the outcome of the race.
So difficult circumstances from top to toe really. Any other questions?

Q. Mark, you said the wettest was 2003, but do you think it might have been 2004?
MARK RAFFAUF: It might have been. It was the year the Kodak copier car won. There have been a lot. I don't remember the exact year. '4? Thank you for the correction, 2004.

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