The only thing that I hate to admit about Repent's post is that he may have a point regarding the rush to polytrack surfaces in light of the sport's long North American history as a dirt-based sport.

For a long period of time, major league baseball stadium owners chose to install artificial grass in lieu of natural grass due to its durability and ease of maintenance and we now see how the number of artificial surfaces in baseball have dwindled to just a few. The key difference is that artificial surfaces in baseball proved to be dangerous to the players and exacerbated injuries rather than prevented them while the expectation with polytrack is that it will prevent injuries to the "players" - those horses who really don't have much influence on the surface over which they ride.

My concern about polytrack is that there should have been a long term pilot track where poly is used for 5-10 years to determine not just the number of breakdowns, but also to see whether the synthetic surface produces other ancillary health problems (lung issues in breathing for example) that actually could outnumber the value in lives saved from breakdown prevention. In other words, are there significant side effects to polytrack? I'd sure like to know before I see every dirt track in America disappear.

By the way, this has become a total hijacking of a post entitled "the lava man thread...."