puttenham wrote:...
Finally, some type of quick setup, super-concrete must have been used as no failure took place given the shape of the "gator teeth", the stress riser is the root fillets between the teeth and the impact loading during the race.
Welcome, puttenham, thanks for informing us that Monza changed the kerbs on the chicane.
I hate chicanes, they seem to me a poor solution to overtaking (crashing the cars once in a while!) and simple curve design. I've argued for them to be replaced by continous spirals like curve number one at China, more interesting for the chassis and aerodynamic designer, but that's another theme, that doesn't bring many comments when I "thread to death" over it...
For normal road conditions, you can open a fresh concrete road to traffic in 12 hours with normal accelerators, like calcium chloride (CaCl2) or less corrosive, more modern ones, like Rapid-1 or Quikcrete.
"Accelerating" - FHWA
I'm pretty sure about this:
damage to the road is proportional to the fourth power of the load.
Road damage due to dynamic tyre forces - Potter & al.
So, a truck, that weighs 100 times what an F1 car does, causes 100^4, or 100 million times the damage. This means normal road conditions are much, much harder than anything that can happen during a race.
Next time you stop on a highway, walk to the edge of the road and wait for a loaded truck to pass, to feel how the earth literally trembles: that gives you a "feeling" of the forces involved.
Again,
I recommend never to drive heavy machinery over a racing track, except for truck races, of course. That's one of the reasons, the other being safety, why access roads are built around a track.
The passage of a single truck causes more damage on the surface than all the damage made by all the other racing cars during the life of the track, to the extent that, when designing the track, many times you do not take in account the number of "standard axles" that the light vehicles (cars) represent, because its number is insignificant when calculated.
However, that doesn't answer your question: you ask specifically for the "stress risers". At different "layers" of the concrete, the stresses are different. The "fourth power" rule is based on the stresses on a continous medium made of layers, like a cake or a layered jell-o, and is valid a few centimeters "down" into the concrete, asphalt or soil.
When you calculate surface forces, they are proportional to the load, and the impact increments that amount three or four times. Again, when you think of a 50 tons truck, even if the "ribs" in the concrete multiply the force by 3 because they diminish the available surface and then, the impact gives you 3 times that force, you still have a "safey margin" of 10 or more over "normal road conditions". Besides, racing cars have wide tyres.
Or so I think...
Also, you wouldn't believe what guys like Mikey_s in this forum can do with "simple" materials like concrete and asphalt, whose technology is centuries old. Calcium chloride has been in use since 1870's.
