Removing Rubber from a Runway

I have to tell you, I was a little bit leery of opening up this thread.
 
Removing rubber from a runway is easy - Full Power, reach Vr, ease back on the stick.... the rubber comes right up with the plane. :)
 
I'd use a long stick. I'd also probably wear gloves.
 
It is done periodically at airports. I flew out of ATL for 24 years and there's a lot of rubber where we all touched down. So every once in awhile a crew or contractor would be out there stripping the rubber off.
 
I'd figure that rubber would be helpful. Why remove it?
 
Years ago I worked at a racetrack (Old Dominion Speedway) which had both a dragstrip and a circle track. About once a month the promoter and a crew would go down to Lynchburg to run drag races on Sunday. I didn't think much of this until I landed one day at New London airport. There was a LOT of rubber on the runway (as well as bleachers). It occurred to me that I was not only landing on a drag strip, but this was the Lynchburg site of the races. While we were wandering around on the field, the state police showed up and asked if we were going to be leaving soon as they wanted to set up cones on the runway and practice driving fast.

Next time the drags were on, Margy and I flew down and did a moderate pass (1000 AGL) over the runway. Wagging our wings I could look down and see my boss from ODS smiling and a waving at us. The next week at the circle track he confirmed it was me. He said he figured it was, but his brother was having a fit that someone didn't get the notam and was going to try to land (not so much of a problem other than the "christmas tree" was set up about 500' down the runway.
 
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