SCRAMP gets booted out of Laguna Seca
62 years of track management ended via an email today. Monterey County has decided that the Sports Car Racing Association of the Monterey Peninsula is no longer worthy of managing Laguna Seca.
According to news coming out of the peninsula the county is in negotiations with an unnamed entity to take over the management of the Laguna Seca Recreational Area.
SCRAMP has been on the chopping block before when Monterey County courted other management options in 2015, 2016, and 2017. No official word as to if any of the past suitors are in line for the job. From where I stand as a photographer that covers many events at Laguna, I can say that while the track surface is on par with other world class tracks, the rest of the facilities are closer to third world. The "media center" is a converted garage, the network infrastructure mounted on folded traffic control barriers. Since the change from Mazda to Weather Tech for naming rights there was a bit of an attempt to turn things around. Buildings were knocked down and the chatter around the paddock was that bigger and better structures were in the works. While the track was in decent shape when I rode it this year, it is getting harder and harder to actually have fun there. Most days have a 92dB sound limit - 95dB is the legal limit for automotive exhaust volume in the state of California. That means that a stock motorcycle can, and in many cases will, violate the sound restrictions. Brutal sound restrictions were touted as the beginning of the end, could this be the death blow for motorsports at Laguna Seca?