Last season the Royal Purple Raceway [RPR] sportsman pits were flooded by days of torrential rains at the Baytown, Texas-based facility leaving many sportsman competitors trapped until the waters subsided. As a result, the NHRA was forced to cancel some sportsman classifications and offer refunds.

Seth Angel of RPR said while the track hasn't paved the sportsman pits, drainage improvements have been implemented in an attempt to prevent last year's flood from happening again.

"We haven’t paved them but we have certainly addressed the drainage issues we’ve had in the past and kind of cleaned out some of those main water escape routes that we had," said Angel. "We just built in some drainage to better increase the flow but outside of that our sportsman pits are the same as they were last year but they’ll drain a lot better. We’ve dressed up the feeder roads that kind of lay out those sportsman pit areas where they’re nice, solid, and easy to access."

Angel, whose family have rich ties to sportsman racing, said the part of the facility which flooded out last year is only used during the national event.

"Of course Sportsman racing is near and dear to us," Angel explained. "It’s the lifeblood of the sport and certainly we were just as equally frustrated with what happened last year as [sportsman racers] were if not more. So at the end of the day we do everything within our means to make sure we can accommodate them and if we can’t then we wouldn’t have them. We certainly want them and we certainly need them and we’ve addressed some issues to try to alleviate those problems but at the end of the day we have the amount of room that we’ve got and the short amount of time just makes it very difficult."

Angel said not paving the sportsman pits isn't about money.

"It’s not about that, we won’t put our profits above the health of the sportsman racers," he added. "We want [sportsman racer] here to feel like they can get in and get out and be taken care of."

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