Dirty Mo Media Original: Bringing Back Wilkesboro

[Music] we are back at North Wilkesboro North Carolina where the field is rolling out for the start of today's 400 lap race on this point six to five mile racetrack [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] Northwest burros been around for 70 years so a very long time it's built in a field on a hill so you go downhill down the front straightaway you go uphill down the back stretch that was always one of the kind of unique characteristics about the track as it wasn't leveled and the last race here I believe is in 1996 in the Cup Series and the tracks kind of been doing it for the most part since then there's been a lot of people that have kind of documented the decay of the racetrack over the years and what shape it's been in [Music] well obviously my connection to the tracks through my father I came here in Washington lot run a lot of races this is one of the racetracks close to the house about 40 minutes late so we could always never miss this race saw a lot of races here even when he won in the black Monte Carlo on the radial tire for the first time I remember coming up this lift behind me up on top of the building they had moved Victor Lane up on top of this building right here and that was just a really cool feature and I remember running around in the drivers lounge which is on the other side of this building having access to that hanging out with my friends and you know we really were all over this racetrack to be honest with you at some point in time during the weekend we never set steel you know love coming here and watching races here I actually came and ran a late-model race here in 1994 we came out and attempted to make the race twice so had some laps here around here personally but my best memories my favorite memories are watching my dad race here [Music] we came out here to basically iRacing can scan and make a perfect replica of any racetrack in the world we are cleaning the track surface so that we can scan the speedway for iRacing you Ranger suite cold and chilly it's more like weather up from where we're from but it's it's been a fun day so far of weeding so I started at iRacing in 2004 I was pretty much the first employee but previous to that we were a company called papyrus racing games and so we've been making NASCAR racing Sims since the 90s and so we basically hired the development staff of papyrus and we built the company up from there with the idea of creating the most authentic racing simulation we could but then also creating the virtual sport of sim racing it is probably the most advanced software for scanning a facility and be able to make the track exactly to the specifications as it is in real life there's nothing comparable [Music] anything that's sticking up out of the cracks we want to try to get rid of because that way when we come into the scanner we're capturing the actual surface and not not being growing out of the track so that because what we're gonna we're gonna have to massage the date a little bit with this because obviously this wasn't how they race the track with all these damage to the track so there's going to be a little bit of a smoothing that we have to do so we need we need to make sure that all of the the grafts and weeds and everything is off the track so that at least we have the clean asphalt surface I was actually on a plane flying to Vegas with with Marcus Smith who owns the racetrack and I said man there's only one way that I can think of to sort of pay some respects to its past in its history and how important it is to our sport and that was to try to have it incorporated into the iRacing software he said yeah I'll do it let's do it it's gonna need a lot of work I don't know if we can get it all cleaned up enough for it to be scanned and I said well Larry reach out to Steve Meyer so I take Steve Myers right there on the plane and he said boy I don't know that'll take a lot of work and so I sent out a tweet and I said to anybody out on Twitter I said if we can clean up this racetrack I racing will scan it so Steve you know I kind of pushed him back in the corner twist his arm a little bit to get him to agree to scanning the track and I told him I said you know there's not a lot of opportunities to really go back in the in the past and recreate something to spec's and this is a rare rare chance for us to do that a lot of the tracks that are part of the NASCAR history are no longer around you know not in such shape this is such a unique rare opportunity that we just couldn't pass up what's really cool about this track is the history and the fact that it's not a current track anymore and I think is an interesting project for us because we typically are still doing you know FIA grade racetracks that you know her meticulously maintained and there's you know no cracks and pavement there's no overgrowth at all so this is a really unique situation it won't be here much longer as it continues to decay if we can take just a scan of the surface the walls we can go back to you know whenever we want and recreate the racetrack as it was in any year and it'll be there forever for us to enjoy it's very time consuming what we'll do is we'll take a like a laser scanner we mount it on a tripod and it's it's about ten feet in the air it takes about 45 minutes to do a complete scan and it'll get about 400 feet of surface but then it'll also shoot up in the air so it'll it'll grab all of the the scouring pylons and the stands in the buildings and so we'll get a general reference point for all the objects around the track so will the center of the scanner is in the middle and then they'll be targets on each side of the scanner and so the scanner acquires those targets and that's kind of how it figures out its place in the world and so once we complete a scan we'll take the back targets and we'll move them to the next location in front of the two existing targets move the scanner into the middle reacquire the targets that we just shot previously and then the new targets on the other side and that's how we're able to stitch all the scan locations together as we always have we maintain two points of reference that we're used in both scans this will probably take I'm gonna guess two or three days to completely scan so the importance of the whole tracked date cleaning was to remove the overgrowth in the seams of the track all the cracks well the scanner does is it picks up the profile to track with all those points the data points and that's how we build the track and then it also applies that to build a 3d mesh or what we call a bump map surface of the race track so you're actually driving on the real surface if you were to drive over just a piece of grass sticking straight up in real life you could just push it over move it out of the way but the sim interprets it as just like a solid structure the grass acts almost like concrete so that's why we had to have it clean before we could go ahead and scan it [Music] we'll take probably 3,000 photographs here over the next two or three days just to capture all the buildings and the textures and all the cool artwork in 1987 I think it's the year that we're gonna pick two to try to recreate so it's going to be a lot of work to go back and kind of find photographs it's going to be an interesting project for us when we recreate a racetrack in iRacing we need to photograph and scan every object let's add the track because we need to be able to turn those objects into 3d models so we'll use the scan in the photo to do that so we'll photograph everything at the track including the track itself the walls the fencing all the buildings all the objects and for example the scoring pile on here and we'll take that data along with the scan files and send it to our artists and they'll be able to create it usually we recreate race tracks as they are when we visit the race track as we can see today the condition is not what it was in 1987 so this will be a bit of a research project as well we're looking forward to it and we're looking forward to recreating that era of Motorsports in that spot it's gonna be amazing it's unique it's different it's not something we get to do every day it's gonna have its challenges for us to build but it's so neat to come out here and look and see everything in its current state and what happened here in the past that we get to bring it back to life again virtually it's gonna be neat to see recreated even if it's in a virtual world you know I'm looking forward to it I think it's important so that's why we're here we had a lot of people come out today to help us clean the surface of the racetrack I think everybody enjoyed being able to just be here and take a look at the place you know they didn't mind getting her hands dirty and working a little bit but I think they also enjoyed just getting a chance to come by and see it and say hello we had you know sunny and the Charlotte Motor Speedway and Bristol Motor Speedway grounds crew guys have done most of the work and we've come in here and got the glory for finishing it off but I mean that they put a ton of effort into getting the surface clean and now I mean you could you could put a car out there right now it looks so good we're preserving the racetrack we're keeping its history alive and all that but it's but it's to be able to give something to the community the iRacing community has been a big part of my life for many many years a lot of people that work at Junior Motorsports so I met through I racing and racing online and sim racing and so it's been such a huge effect and positive effect on my life and this is a way for me or us just to do something for the community sale is probably our biggest fan and it's interesting is I don't think people really understand how long he's been involved and trying to evolve simracing and my first day at work at papyrus I joined a multiplayer like we had we had these testing sessions where we would go and we'd race the tracks and kind of find the bugs and Dale was on the grid like next to me in life he's been involved since the papyrus and trying to help us collect data and whenever we need something he's always the first one to pick up the phonee the fact that you know all these people showed up here today to kind of help us you know clean up his track to do this it's just a testament to him and and how passionate he is about sim racing and how he wants to recreate this track and save it because you know this will never see another race in the real world so now people are going to get a chance to come into the virtual world and in race this track forever it'll be as close to real life as you could possibly get so it's going to take a lot of people back in time it's going to be it's going to introduce a lot of people for the first time to the North rostral Speedway in its history so this is just a really fun opportunity to be able to hop in my sim rig and run a few laps and relive some old history [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s Dirty Mo Media

Views: 411,206

Keywords: Dale Earnhardt Jr., Dale Jr., North Wilkesboro, Bringing Back Wilkesboro, Wilkesboro, NASCAR, Dirty Mo Media, DMM, Dale Jr podcast, Dale Earnhardt, iRacing, iracing

Id: UNAyO19oIz0

Length: 14min 52sec (892 seconds)

Published: Thu May 07 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Shadow_Six]

Dang guys, 1987? We need a Gen 3 Monte Carlo and a Gen 3 T-bird for this thing.

[u/Dalejr0388]

Can't wait till this track is released....

[u/Shadow_Six]

I just had another thought. Is ’87 before they built the pit wall? That’d be interesting

[u/la_luke]

If it took 3 days to scan that track how long did it take to do nurburgring?