Highlights

• The Bandimere family wanted to do something special to commemorate the 50th anniversary of their quarter-mile racetrack in Morrison, Colo., located just outside of Denver.
• The family worked with Tony Vecchiarelli, owner of Tony V Plumbing & Heating, to create an Uponor track cooling system for the raceway.
• After installation, drivers noticed greater control and faster times due to the 30-degree difference in the track surface provided by the cooling system.

Background

To mark the 50th anniversary of their racetrack, the Bandimere family sought engineering and professional installation help to create the nation’s first substantial radiant track cooling system. Tony Vecchiarelli, owner of Arvada, CO-based Tony V Plumbing & Heating, came on board to do the installation.

“We were thrilled to be involved in a radiant cooling project this substantial,” says Vecchiarelli. “We helped with the layout of the system along with fabrication and setting of the manifolds.”

The track cooling system acts like a radiant heat system in reverse. Rather than supplying heat, it sends chilled water into an immense network of embedded tubing to draw heat out of the high-mass concrete slab, wicking away heat faster than the sun supplies it.

Just three inches below the track’s surface lies 15,000 feet of ¾" Uponor AQUAPEX® tubing for serious cooling of the surface above. The cooling system circulates 110 gallons per minute, removing just over one million BTUs of heat per hour.

“Another challenge we’re solving is the inconsistencies caused by solar gain on the track,” says system design engineer Brandon Thompson, PE, president of Thompson Engineering in Littleton, Colo.

“The purpose of the system’s design — in addition to cooling the starting lanes of the race track — was to evenout the temperatures for both east and west lanes,” he says. “Bandimere is built next to a hill and as the sun goes down, the west lane is shaded sooner than the east lane, so it cools faster.”

Thompson worked closely with Him Ly, commercial sales engineer for Uponor. According to Thompson, their initial design calculations determined track temperatures could be lowered by 20 degrees. They actually learned that an 18-degree difference was achieved without a chiller and cooling tower, so they knew it would be possible to improve track temperatures even more dramatically by circulating chilled water.