COVID-sniffing dogs will be at Atlanta Motor Speedway this weekend

COVID-sniffing dogs will be at Atlanta Motor Speedway this weekend ahead of the tripleheader of NASCAR national series races.

This news was announced on the NASCAR website on Tuesday, March 16, and will apply only to the NASCAR Cup Series’ QuikTrip Folds of Honor 500 on Sunday, which will go green around 3 p.m. ET with TV coverage on Fox.

If the COVID-19 testing protocol is considered successful, it may be used throughout the rest of the season.

Two teams of dogs will screen essential personnel, which mostly consists of NASCAR officials, drivers, pit crews and team owners, determining in around 30 seconds whether COVID is present, letting their handlers know if this is the case.

If the COVID-sniffing dogs do detect the virus, those people will be isolated and further inspected by American Medical Response (AMR) Safety Team members.

COVID-sniffing dogs to be used at Atlanta Motor Speedway this weekend.

“We think that these dogs and this capability is going to allow us to rapidly confirm that all of those people entering the essential footprint on Sunday — that’s race teams, that’s NASCAR officials, that’s the vendors that work inside the garage — all those folks are COVID-free or not,” Tom Bryant, NASCAR managing director of racing operations, said in a press release. “The ability to do that has kind of been the math problem that we have continuously tried to solve since March of last year.”

As part of extensive shuffling of the schedule, NASCAR was able to complete the 2020 season in all divisions, though many races were held without qualifying as a way to reduce the amount of people needed at the track, and many races did not allow any fans in attendance, both of which have carried over to much of the 2021 season as well.

It is unclear how many fans AMS will allow in at the 1.5 mile track in the suburb of Hampton this weekend, though they installed a dog park as part of extensive infield renovations last year, only for their race to be postponed right at the start of the pandemic and then run in June without fans.

Hopefully the new dog park will be able to get some use this weekend.

According to the press release, the dogs, which come from 360 K9 Group, which has training facilities in both Anniston, Alabama and New Smyrna Beach, Florida, will not be screening the drivers or the fans, however.

The 360 K9 Group is a collection of canine security companies that include WWK9, Coast to Coast K9, CSK9, Bio-Detection K9 and Southern Coast K9, in addition to the US Canine Biathlon organization.  While not stated in the press release, it seems possible that the teams working at AMS are from Bio-Detection K9, which specializes in virus detection.

“This gives us essentially an ability to test that essential population on race day and know right away that those folks who have cleared this enhanced screening process with a very high degree of confidence are COVID-free,” Bryant continued.

The NBA’s Miami Heat have been using COVID-sniffing dogs to screen limited amounts of fans at American Airlines Arena for around a month now, which seems to have gone well.

Though the race is in Georgia, both title sponsors come from eastern Oklahoma, as gas station chain QuikTrip is headquartered in Tulsa while the military charity Folds of Honor is headquartered in Owasso.

The reigning Atlanta winners are Kevin Harvick (Cup), AJ Allmendinger (Xfinity) and Grant Enfinger (Trucks), while Charlee the Labrador’s dad Martin Truex Jr parked his Joe Gibbs Racing No. 19 Toyota in Victory Lane in the Cup Series last week at Phoenix, and his teammate Denny Hamlin leads the points standings.

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