The new canter down
recalls. “The new access road, (75mm tarmac on top of 350mm sub-base) not only serves emergency vehicles and veterinary surgeons on race days but is used by joggers, walkers, cyclists and wheelchair users outside of races.” Started in November 2007, construction of the service road carried on right through that extremely wet winter. Now part of the project team, Mallinsons, began construction on the 7 x 225mm carrier drains and on the main collector drains inside the running rail during February and March 2008, “The Knavesmire is quite flat,” explains John Mallinson, “and it’s served by a central, culvert going into the river. We needed to install a number of outfalls going from the main drain, so that the whole area could be drained without any one outfall having to be constructed at too deep an angle.”
In late spring 2008, work began on a ten metre wide extension to the Home (south) bend, consisting of a 150mm sand carpet, underlying a 250mm sand/soil mix. “We completed everything right up to the turf laying stage, knowing that we would have to come back to install the main track drainage once the racing season was over,” John continues. Adrian, along with his deputy, John
Morley, and Mike Harbridge had already chosen his turf, which was being grown eight miles away at the Lindum turf farm in Thorganby. “I knew that I wanted locally grown turf as it would be produced on a similar soil type to the Knavesmire” Adrian explains. “We went to see a few local turf growers and decided that Lindum had the right sports turf grass type for us.” Twelve thousand six hundred square metres of the company’s LT6, a high ryegrass and
Ready for race day
smooth stalked meadow grass mixture, were ordered ready for harvest during the winter of 2008 when it would finally be laid on the south bend extension. LT6 had been used successfully on the new north bend, completed in preparation for the Royal Ascot meeting hosted by York Racecourse prior to Adrian’s arrival. It also had a further racing pedigree after being chosen for extensive improvements at Haydock Park and the new bend at Ripon two years ago.
What happened next in 2008 was the wettest July and August on record, circumstances that left the team coping with the first ever abandonment of the Ebor Festival due to waterlogging. Adrian picks up the tale, “Everyone had worked so hard to prepare for the Ebor Festival and then we gave it our very best shot over some trying days, after what was described as ‘biblical rainfall’, but it just wasn't to be.” The bitter irony of scheduling an early finish to the 2008 season, so as to progress the drainage project, was not lost on the York team, displaying a wry humour on the disappointment, Adrian notes, “we had the diggers ready to go and John got started a couple of days early.”
An intense phase of the project followed during that autumn, as Mallinsons began the huge task of installing drainage on every section of the two mile race track itself. Twenty-four miles of lateral pipe drains were laid across the track, feeding into the carrier drains, which lead into the main drain, and eventually the culvert and the river. Sand slits were installed at right angles to the lateral drains and at one metre centres right round the track.
The company excavated down 300mm
from the surface, inserted gravel to 150mm depth and topped up with rootzone. “We worked from dawn to dusk for about seven weeks,” John remembers. “After sand slitting we needed to repair the surface. It needed to be seeded and made to look like a racecourse.” The overriding memory is of the great teamwork and the image of their beloved racing surface turning into a chess board of drains and slits, Adrian recalls. “We knew it would come back, nature is wonderful like that and we had lots of confidence in the team; yet even now, as I remember those drains going in, my heart rate still picks up a notch.” The turf went down on the south bend at the end of the year 2008, and Arden Lea finished the installation of the new Rainbird irrigation system, which has pop-up and the facility for boom irrigators around both the inside and outside of the track. The network was then connected to a brand new bore hole drilled 90 metres below the surface and a pump installed 35 metres down. The racecourse could now irrigate using water that had fallen some ten thousand years earlier and now lay trapped in the sandstone aquifer; in a city with a strong Viking and Roman heritage the team had unlocked a resource that predated even these inhabitants.
Demonstrating the capacity of this team to learn, even from adversity, came the new canter down. Reflecting on August 2008, an variation was made to the scheme to provide yet more protection for the main racecourse, and the turf canter down was added. At a 1,000 metres long and 3.5 metres wide, it takes horses safely towards the start of a sprint race. Constructed, drained, sand
Lindum turf being laid on the widened south bend 98
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