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Friday, February 28, 1997

Lone Star Park racing surface created and maintained with brotherly love

By RANDY MOSS Fort Worth Star-Telegram

FORT WORTH, Texas - On the surface, it seems like an easy job. But designing and maintaining the racing strips is undoubtedly the dirtiest work at the new Lone Star Park horse track, and perhaps the most difficult and unusual.

"When people find out what I do, they look at me like I'm from another planet," said Dennis Moore, the architect of Lone Star's one-mile dirt track and seven-furlong inner grass course.

The California-based Moore, 47, is one of the most celebrated members of a tiny fraternity of consultants who build racing strips from scratch and repair broken ones. Famed horseman D. Wayne Lukas brought Moore in when rain washed out his training track near San Diego. When Sheik Mohammed al Maktoum needed help last year with his five racing ovals, he flew Moore to Dubai.

Moore's regular job is at Hollywood Park, but he also designed the surface at Sam Houston Race Park, which has been praised by trainers and jockeys.

When Lone Star decided to spend big bucks for a safe and consistent racetrack, Moore was the logical choice.

"We gave Dennis an unlimited budget, and he exceeded it," general manager Corey Johnsen said with a half-serious laugh, referring to the $1.2 million spent on the track surface. "But if we hope to attract and keep the top stables, we've got to have a top-notch track surface."

Moore has supervised the high-priority project while making frequent trips from the West Coast to prepare the track for Lone Star's live season, which opens April 17. His brother, Ron, moved here and is responsible for daily maintenance. They grew up around racetrack dirt; their father took care of Hollywood's track beginning in 1946, so they know what makes a good track.

A perfect dirt surface is soft enough to protect the legs of million-dollar thoroughbreds, but bouncy enough to help propel the horse, Dennis Moore said. Those properties must remain constant through summer rainstorms, heat waves and a morning-to-afternoon pounding from hooves and heavy machinery.

The track should hold moisture yet dry quickly after rain. The turns must be banked, but not so much that the dirt washes to the inside. The cushion depth should be uniform, and the surface fair to horses with frontrunning and come-from-behind styles.

The health of expensive and fragile horses makes the margin for error distressingly small. A hard track causes bone fractures and chips. Too much depth causes muscle damage.

Much of that is true for turf courses as well, with an added problem of securing the root system so that huge grass clumps aren't ripped out during a race.

And there is no universal prescription. Methods used in California and Kentucky won't necessarily work in Texas because of the differences in climate and soil content.

"A lot of people take racetracks for granted, like you just throw some dirt out there or grow a little grass," Moore said. "Maybe 40 or 50 years ago that's all it was, but it has gone far beyond that now."

At Lone Star, Moore's first challenge was unstable ground at the Grand Prairie site, which required using cement to stabilize the area beneath the tracks.

Moore studied weather patterns and developed his surface specifications for Lone Star's dirt track: a fine, sugary sand containing 13 percent to 15 percent silt and clay, in about equal portions, similar to the Sam Houston track composition. Then he spent months in a wide-ranging search for the right soil, assisted by a Houston excavation company.

Knowing that a precise moisture content is the key to any good track, Moore was unwilling to fudge on his numbers.

Surface moisture gives a track bounce, and thus the water-retaining properties of clay are vital for hot and dry summer periods when hundreds of thousands of gallons of water will be applied to the track each day by water trucks. But if a track has too much clay, it becomes waterlogged and dries slowly after rain.

Smooth-edged fine sand was chosen because it binds more easily than coarse sand, Moore said. A racetrack with too much coarse sand causes abrasions on horses' heels and cannot hold moisture in hot weather, because surface water seeps between the rough edges of sand particles and quickly drains off the track. That creates a dry and loose surface known in racing lingo as a "cuppy" track, because hooves slip and create cup-shaped impressions in the track.

Also, when a gullywasher is expected, fine sand can be tightly compacted and sealed with a heavy roller so that rain will be unable to penetrate the cushion. At least three dozen samples were obtained from area soil sources, and Moore sent them to an Orange, Calif., laboratory for analysis. Each was rejected.

Moore decided to purchase fine sand from one source and the silt and clay mixture from another, and blend them on-site. A 10-inch cushion was laid onto the track beginning in November.

An extra ingredient will be added soon: a byproduct of the plant from which Metamucil is derived. Experts aren't sure why, but the organic material helps a track with compaction and water retention.

For the turf course at Lone Star, 48,000 square yards of resilient Bermuda 419 sod was rolled out in October, and an irrigation system was installed. Millions of inch-long mesh turf grids were mixed into the top four inches of the growing medium beneath the sod, in hopes that grass roots will intertwine with the grids and become tougher to pull out, an idea that has shown promise in other states.

The dirt track will get its first test March 10, when horses entered in the March 18 Fasig Tipton 2-year-olds-in-training sale will be allowed to gallop.

The turf course is expected to be ready in mid-May, with the City of Arlington Stakes scheduled for May 26 as the first grass stakes.

Of course, regardless of preparations or the amount of money spent, complaints from horsemen are inevitable. Even at tracks such as Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky., and Fair Grounds in New Orleans, which have reputations for outstanding surfaces, trainers and jockeys will often blame the footing for a disappointing defeat rather than blame themselves or their horses.

At racetracks with problem surfaces, discord among horsemen can disrupt an entire meeting. Trinity Meadows jockeys once boycotted because of what they called an unsafe track, and trainers were said to be pondering similar action when the Willow Park facility closed in August.

When Moore visited Dubai last year at the invitation of Sheikh Mohammed, he attended the camel races. As soon as camel trainers discovered that Moore is a racing-surface expert, he was besieged with complaints.

"This track is too cuppy!" one trainer exclaimed.

Moore says he probably isn't as thick-skinned as he should be.

"I've had two heart attacks, two angioplasties and a stent, so I guess I haven't done a very good job of dealing with it over the years," he said.

Ron Moore, 50, left a prestigious job as track superintendent at Santa Anita in Arcadia, Calif., in 1983 to join the Los Angeles Police Department, which he left in 1993. He most recently directed security at Los Alamitos Racetrack near Los Angeles.

"He thought it was easier being a member of the LAPD working in Watts during the riots," Dennis Moore said. "That gives you a good indication of what it's like to be a trackman."

But for now at least, the job is sweet. Nary a horse has lost a race at Lone Star.

"From everything I've seen, Lone Star is really trying to do things right with its racetrack, and horsemen appreciate that," trainer Donnie Von Hemel said on a recent visit. "That's something you can't cut corners on."

"He used to be frugal," Lone Star GM Johnsen said, joking. "But then he built a track for one of the sheiks and he lost all concept of reality."

But as Moore once told an Eclipse Award-winning millionaire owner who complained about the cost of repairing a training track, you don't want million-dollar horses running on a nickel-and-dime surface.

"That's the situation you're faced with," he said. "It is expensive. But if it would have cost (Lone Star) twice as much money to locate the material to make the track work, then that's what we would have had to spend.

"And they would have spent it." ---

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