With Formula 4 championship around the corner, all eyes on race track coming up in Chennai

With the 3.7-km Formula 4 race track scheduled to be unveiled in the early part of December, work at Swami Sivananda Salai, Island Grounds, Flagstaff House Road and a stretch of Anna Salai hits the fast track. The Hindu Downtown catches up with the blistering activity at the midnight hour

Swami Sivananda Salai close to midnight on November 17 | Photo Credit: PRINCE FREDERICK

Racing against time

Midnight is just one strike away and excavators with different types of attachments (buckets and crane hooks) are scurrying up and down Swami Sivananda Salai, sometimes a lorry in tow. Regular vehicular traffic is allowed on one side of the road. The traffic however has thinned as the day (November 17) is in its death throes.

The machines under the glare of streetlamps standing by the side of the road. The median is being pummelled by the excavators and these lampposts were the first to be cleared out of the way.

The median from Adam’s Road junction to Kamarajar Salai junction is going through a process of dismantlement, long slabs being pulled out with the practised ease of a dentist extracting a tooth.

A platoon of workers assist the machines in clearing the emerging debris. Blocks are tied with ropes for a telehandler excavator to hook and drop it in a lorry.

A team of Greater Chennai Corporation officials are at the site overseeing the operations that is dressing up Swami Sivananda Salai for a role in a motorsports initiative.

Parking a sports initiative at Island Grounds

Gate Number 6 at Island Grounds which provides access to the TTDC Drive-in restaurant is open well past the last order of the day. The contours of a wide trench of massive dimensions emerge through the dinghiness of the night. A section of the trench has been genrously matted with big blue-metal stones. Mounds of big blue-metal stones wait to be spread across the rest of the trench. The uncovered stretch is being prepared, sand being dug up by excavators and deposited in lorries. Workers level the land with iron spades. The work unfolds under what appears to be a high-intensity LED lamp, temporary but powerful.

Beyond the gravel, the trench would receive other layers until it becomes a track suitable for the movement of Formula 4 machines. This part of the 3.7-km track would be its start and end points.

A Greater Chennai Corporation official remarks that this section of Island Grounds was a parking lot and even after the modification, it will continue as a parking lot except when the annual Formula 4 racing event is under way.

Placement of barricades

The most prominent feature of the work at Flagstaff House Road is arrival of barricades. Many of them have checked in, and many others in the process of doing so. Flatbeds carrying barricades work in tandem with telehandler machines with hooks to lift and lodge the barricades on the road. A Greater Chennai Corporation official says fence will be erected on the barricades, and that, besides the presence of barricades, Flagstaff House Road will not undergo any significant modification. “The ropad will be relaid,” the official says.

Anna Salai

The midnight oil was being burnt on a section of Anna Salai that would go to make up the race track. A stretch of the arterial road near its intersection with Flagstaff House Road, was barricaded for the work.

The GCC official says the median on this section of Anna Salai (from its intersection with Flagstaff House Road to its intersection with Swami Sivananda Salai) will be dismantled.