Did Armscor really build a particle accelerator under the high speed oval at Gerotek?
I will get to this urban legend in a minute, bear with me while I give you some background. For Christmas my husband gave me a gift voucher for an Subaru advanced driver’s day. This is an event run by Subaru at Gerotek, the vehicle testing facility near Pretoria and the nearby Zwartkops Raceway. The advertised reason for this day is to educate Subaru drivers about the features and performance limits of their cars. The real reason is to give keen Subaru owners an opportunity to play with their cars, in a controlled environment, until their brakes smoke. As we have established in a previous post, my husband has ample reason to lack confidence in my driving abilities. I too lack confidence in my driving abilities, so it was with a great deal of trepidation that I drove myself off to the back of beyond to be put through the driving wringer.
Gerotek used to be the place (and may still be for all I know) where Armscor tested their tanks. Now it is used as a funfair for motor car enthusiasts. It has all sorts of tracks to play on, off road, mountain roads, measured kilometers, skid pans and my personal favourite, the high speed oval. One drives over the high speed oval on entering the facility, there is a bridge that crosses it and you have a terrifying glimpse of the camber over the side. Hell, I thought, I am pleased we are only here for the skid pan! Wrong.
The skid pan was fun. It is very hard to skid a Subaru, and believe me, those in the Imprezas tried VERY hard. Just a word about Subaru drivers. Half of them are Mommies who need a super safe, practical vehicle, to ferry their children about in, just in case they happen to roll it on the N3. With one exception, me, these ladies were not there that day, they were all at ballet and soccer practice. The other half are hard core performance crazed maniacs who use the highway as a form of stress relief. That day some of them had driven down from a dealership in Botswana and made in time for the welcome breakfast.
Next up was the high speed oval. This is basically a very big concrete ditch with an ascending slope on the outer edge. The top of the camber is level with the ground and the rest scoops down to the lowest bit where it flattens out. The track designers obviously didn’t want to excavate the whole inside of the oval so they just left the central island in place and put a large concrete retaining wall around it. There are bridges crossing it, supported on large concrete columns. Make a mistake and you are marmalade.
I didn’t cope very well with it at all. I ended up in tears after two laps. But that is not what this story is about. When I was telling my friend David Allen about my experience he mentioned that there is a rumour that the oval is just the surface excuse for a particle accelerator below. Given Gerotek’s dark and murky history as a weapons manufacturer’s laboratory, and it’s proximity to Pelindaba, this may just be a believable story. Until you go onto Google Earth and take a good look at it from above.
Now I don’t pretend to be a nuclear physicist, but I do imagine that getting a subatomic particle to do anything co-operative is very difficult and expensive indeed. Getting it to follow an oval tunnel must be very challenging, just as you get it to go around the corner it then has to go straight for a bit and then turn, turn TURN you stupid quark, now go straight, straight STRAIGHT. Damn, you’re marmalade. Does anyone have another quark we can use?
I am sorry David, I just couldn’t resist. Do you want to do lunch next week?
Making marmalade is the whole point of particle accelerators. The fact that it’s oval suggests there isn’t one there — they’re usually round.
When they finished the worlds biggest particle accelerator in Europe recently, they had to deal with court challenges from some physicists who thought they might accidentally create a mini-blackhole that would swallow the Earth.
When you’ve been to Gerotek, though, you realise it would be hard to notice the difference after such an event
What do you have against Gerotek? I am not sure what you mean by the last comment. All that exists there now are a lot of car club enthusiasts and trainee truck drivers. Subaru have their own hospitality pavillion!
Ahahaha! This is brilliant! I actually work in that field (I’m doing my PhD in particle physics on one of the experiments at the European accelerator that David mentioned) but I’d never heard of the Gerotek rumour. Anyway, David’s right – you get accelerators in all sorts of shapes (round, straight, sort of rectangular with round curves at each end – it just depends on where you put the magnets) but oval is definitely not the best choice. Pity, actually…
I’ve also been to Gerotek – my husband gave me the mazda course for my birthday two years ago, and I had a blast! Though the mazdas themselves were a bit dinky. Anyway, it wasn’t the high speed oval that freaked me out, did you do the “driving on the windy road with trees going down slopes on each side” thing? Screw up there and you’re gonna roll AWAY!