GREAT VINTAGE GARAGES: DUNCAN DAYTON
A grand facility that not only houses a wonderful collection of vintage race cars, but a modern racing team as well

MY FAVORITE RACE
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VOICES OF OUR HEROES, PART I
An insightful look at Mickey Thompson, the hot rodder who broke the land speed record

MG K3 MAGNETTE: BORN TO RACE
MG fans have their holy grail, the superlative K3 Magnette

SAM HANKS: THE ALHAMBRA KID
Fifty years ago, Sam Hanks climbed into a radical Indy car and came away with racing's biggest prize

HISTORY OF LAGUNA SECA, PART 2 (click here to read more)
We continue our Golden Anniversary rembrance by resuming our journey from 1983 to the present day

Half A Century at Laguna Seca

by John Zimmerman

PART TWO 1983-2007

Through five decades, Laguna Seca has endeared itself to racing fans by firing their imaginations with the magnificent stories generated by its events. We continue our Golden Anniversary remembrance by resuming our journey through that past.

The first major race weekend of Laguna’s second quarter century was the sixth round of IMSA’s 1983 Camel GT series. Al Holbert took pole position with his March 83G-Chevy, then led all the way and set fastest race lap to score the second of seven wins that earned him the first of his three GTP championships.

Although the Superbikes and Historics enjoyed their traditional summer dates, the focus that year fell upon autumn’s arrival of Championship Auto Racing Teams’ PPG Indy Car World Series. When America’s National Championship made its inaugural appearance at the track, Teo Fabi dominated the proceedings from the beginning in Gerry Forsythe’s March 83C-Cosworth. Fabi, who won Laguna’s Can-Am round in 1981, took pole and surrendered the lead only briefly during pit stops.

Interestingly, the Italian’s pole time of 56.920, was 1.5 seconds slower than the clocking Al Unser Jr. had recorded the previous year with Rick Galles’ Can-Am Frissbee, although few in the capacity crowd seemed to notice. Among those on hand that day was F1 constructor Frank Williams, whose presence fueled rumors that his team would soon be building Champ Cars. Williams denied all such thoughts—honestly as it turned out—explaining that he was simply taking care of some business in the U.S., and adding, “I had always heard that this was a nice racetrack and a nice part of the world, so I thought I’d drop by.”

Change in Status

As George Orwell’s iconic year of 1984 unfolded, Laguna Seca marked its first decade as a county park. This aspect of track history was left undiscussed in Part 1, but once again it was Ed Magner at the helm during a crucial period.

“We thought it would be better if we were part of the county,” he explains, “so we went through the process of getting the land declared surplus by the military. The politicians in those days were looking for ways to be better citizens, giving up land and such, so they went ahead and we created a park.

“Now bear in mind, that since this is a county park, if you come in and build anything, as soon as you file a notice of completion, the county owns the building. SCRAMP is technically only a tenant, and the rent we pay goes into a fund that helps maintain the park.”

With the unending expansion of the nation’s population, the outskirts of Monterey soon began creeping toward Laguna Seca, bringing along complaints from new residents disturbed by the noise from a facility established long before they arrived on the scene.

“Forty years ago there were very few homes in those hills,” continues Magner about the surrounding countryside, “and noise was a problem even then. Now, they’ve put in a lot of homes and noise is a real factor. It’s funny when they say, ‘Ed, you’ve gotta raise more money for a local charity,’ and I say, ‘Wait a minute, you just told me I’m making too much noise…’” That balancing act continues, and the county has imposed attendance caps as one way to minimize the impact of events on the locals.

When the Champ Cars returned for their second Laguna outing in October of ’84, Bobby Rahal began a winning streak destined to stretch for four full years. Having previously claimed the track’s Can-Am round in 1979, Rahal delighted the team that Jim Trueman had built around him by bringing the Truesports March 84C home 13sec ahead of Mario Andretti’s pole-winning Newman/Haas Lola, with Michael Andretti taking third.

The next year, Bobby was joined on the rostrum by Al Unser and Al Jr.—in the midst of an intense family squabble for the PPG Cup—after he’d started from pole and driven away to win again. In ’86 he prevailed from a race-long scuffle with Danny Sullivan (Penske March 86C) and Michael Andretti (Kraco March 86C) in a crucial round of their three-cornered fight for that year’s PPG Cup, which Rahal also won.

As the track celebrated its 30th anniversary in 1987, Rahal’s win with Truesports’

Lola clinched his second straight National Championship—once primary challenger Michael Andretti dropped out. Bobby is understandably very proud of his accomplishment—which led SCRAMP to christen the climb to The Corkscrew in his honor—but personally laments the change the track was about to undergo. “I never won on it after they changed it,” he muses. “I only won on the original course, the real course, when men were men. At least that’s my take on it! I think there, especially in the Champ Cars, the cars had a lot more fuel in them and you really had to know how you wanted the car set up for each run so you could make your tires last. I think we were just fortunate that we had that setup.”

As noted in Part 1, Mario Andretti established the all-time lap record for Laguna’s original configuration during qualifying for that ’87 race, an accomplishment he cherishes. “There was a pucker factor, to be sure,” he grins, “and if you missed an apex by an inch, the way everything was, you were gonna wind up who knows where because in some of those corners the speed was so high. To put the lap time together you really had to strap it in there. I know I was really up for it, and it was one of those deals where we were just going for it: ‘Put another set of tires on, because I think I know where I can pick up a little extra.’ And that was that.”

Beyond establishing that record and having the revised layout’s new Turn 2 hairpin named for him, Mario’s memories of Laguna Seca also include a couple of exhibition laps on a Grand Prix motorcycle, sharing the podium with Michael in ’91 and ’92, and running his very last Champ Car race at the track in 1994. His most vivid remembrances, however, may be a pair of testing accidents he had there.

The first came during a 1986 tire test while trying to take old Turn 2 without lifting. The feat was just not possible that day and, as Dan Gurney had predicted, Mario’s resulting crash looked like an airplane wreck. Standing among the scattered remnants of his car as the rest of his team arrived on the scene, the unscathed Andretti calmly informed his engineer, Morris Nunn, that the turn was not yet flat.

The next year, “I was testing tires and the wing came off,” Mario relates. “It’s amazing that I used to do that turn flat. At the very end of the days of the old circuit, that was my big challenge. At the entry to the corner the rear wing just broke off, and I could have wound up somewhere in the ocean if it weren’t for that bank. The car broke in half when I hit the dirt embankment, and the tub rolled over so I was upside down on the tarmac for a long time, and it ground my helmet right down to the inner liner. If it had gone any farther, I would have got a haircut!”

Bobby Rahal wasn’t Laguna’s only repeat winner in those days, as Al Holbert in an ’85 Porsche 962 took his second IMSA win in three seasons, and German Klaus Ludwig doubled up the next two years, first with a Zakspeed Ford Probe and then Bruce Leven’s 962. Later that season, a budding young star from nearby Morgan Hill named Jimmy Vasser made Laguna the site of his first Formula Atlantic win.

Altered Outlook

It was the coming of World Championship motorcycle racing to Laguna Seca that ultimately changed the original layout. The track had flirted with bike racing on several prior occasions, but aspirations of internationality brought the necessity for a new configuration. The downside of attracting this global attention was that the daunting Turns 2 and 3 were consigned to history. So, with 1987’s last event in the books, work began on the nearly $2 million construction project that would lengthen the circuit about three-tenths of a mile to suit the Federation Internationale de Motocyclisme (FIM).

Some faint hope also glimmered that this would make Laguna a candidate to host the United States Grand Prix for Formula 1, but Ed Magner rationalizes that this was never really going to happen. “We met with Bernie Ecclestone because we thought maybe we could bring the cars at the same time. If you remember, the cars raced in Phoenix, and they made a choice: ‘Do we go to Phoenix or do we go to Monterey? If we go to Monterey, Bernie will spend $7 million; if we go to Phoenix, Phoenix would spend $7 million.’ Guess what they did?”

Despite recognizing that F1 wouldn’t be part of its future, SCRAMP went ahead with the alterations to accommodate the motorcycles. “When the FIM people came to help us make the changes,” Magner explains, “Joe Zegbart, who was from Holland and headed the competition committee, and I went around in a golf cart with three or four vans behind us for all the engineers. Each time we’d come to a turn we’d stop and they’d all get out, and the figures were going around in my head because everything they did cost money.

“We got to The Corkscrew and I said to Joe, ‘Look, we’ve got a problem here; this is special and there’s not much we can do to make it conform to anything, it’s just the way it is.’ And he said: ‘You and I do not have the right to change it. We are coming here because of this. This is the most famous turn in the world. You and I cannot change it, we don’t even have to stop.’ So, like two old men I said, ‘Well, let’s go through The Corkscrew on a golf cart. Hold on!’”

With the modifications complete, the new Laguna Seca kicked off its 1988 season in April with the reborn United States Motorcycle Grand Prix, where the USA’s own Eddie Lawson celebrated the red, white and blue day by riding his Yamaha YZR500 to victory. The GP Bikes hadn’t raced in America since running at Daytona 23 years before, so their return was very well received, and the bike races continue to draw Laguna’s largest crowds.

Danny Sullivan won that fall’s Champ Car race for Roger Penske, the first of five victories Penske’s cars would claim at Laguna over the next seven seasons. Sully won again in 1990, after teammate Rick Mears had scored an emotional triumph in ’89, his first road-race win after gruesome foot injuries suffered in a crash five years before.

Following a three-year hiatus, IMSA’s Camel GT series returned for 1991 with a midsummer outing won from pole by Davy Jones in Tom Walkinshaw’s spectacular Jaguar XJR-16. That race also marked the first outing for Dan Gurney’s Toyota Eagle MkIII, but a pit-stop error that day kept Juan Fangio II (and the car that would come to dominate GTP) from winning its debut. Fangio and teammate PJ Jones did win handily with the MkIII in 1992 and 1993, respectively, each time with their partner placing second..

For August’s Historics weekend in 1991, Steve Earle broke precedent by featuring a driver rather than a marque—but not just any driver. The man in question was five-time World Champion Juan Manuel Fangio. A selection of the legendary Argentinean’s championship-winning machinery was also on hand, and with many of his old friends and foes on hand to honor him, the octogenarian immensely enjoyed taking them out for demonstration laps. A similar distinction would be bestowed upon Cobra creator Carroll Shelby six years later.

When the Champ Cars returned that October, championship-bound Michael Andretti disrupted the Penske dominance with his Newman/Haas Lola, then repeated in ’92, both times sharing the podium with his dad. The next year, however, Paul Tracy put a Penske-Chevrolet back on top, and then did it again with Mercedes-Benz power in ’94.

The Pass

Champ Cars were the only four-wheel pro race weekend on the Laguna calendar in both ’95 and ’96, and in the latter year another amazing chapter of the track’s history was written. It involved a single audacious move but, just as John Cannon’s rain-soaked Can-Am win in 1968 is a milestone in Laguna Seca’s first 25 years, so does “The Pass” illuminate the track’s second quarter century.

On the last lap of the last race of the season, Bryan Herta looked set to score his first Champ Car win, but a late caution had complicated matters. When the yellow came out, several lapped cars separated Herta from second-placed Alex Zanardi, but CART was at that time experimenting with a rule that removed all the lapped cars from the lead pack and put them behind. So, as they took the green to begin the race’s final phase, Herta found his mirrors full of the red livery of Zanardi’s Target Reynard. Still, passing is notoriously difficult at Laguna, and the Italian’s only real hope was that Herta would make a mistake.

“At that point,” explains Herta, “I was kind of struggling with my tires, but I was able to hold him off until the last lap when he got a good run coming up the hill. He moved to the inside and I started to turn in on him because I wasn’t going to let him by, and right at the last second I stopped because he was coming so quickly that I really thought he wasn’t going to make the corner. Sure enough, he did slide by, and through skill or luck or some combination of the two, he bounced down the hill and came back on the track ahead of me.”

Zanardi later recounted his side of the episode to Traveling Light Media’s Adam Friedman for a forthcoming documentary: “There was a great deal of luck involved with that move, but I tried it because I felt I deserved to win. I drove really well and qualified to get pole. I pulled away in the first part of the race, but after the first pit stop, with the second set of tires, I picked up a blister. I was a sitting duck, and Bryan Herta came by.

“He made a clean pass on me, and off he went. I did everything I could to keep the car in second place. Then we had another yellow, and the advantage Bryan had built up to that point was, of course, neutralized by the yellow flag. I tried everything I could to get in front of him, but he drove beautifully, without making mistakes, for the last 20 laps; therefore I sat there.

“I knew I had to come up with something if I wanted to win that race. I knew I had to be brave, because I knew he would not give me an opportunity. Once we got to the final lap I knew that I had to do something that was totally unexpectable [sic] for him, taking advantage of the fact that he was going to win his first race.

“I thought that as soon as we had gone around Turn 5, which is the last place you can easily overtake somebody, he would have felt like, ‘Wow that’s it, I’ve done it,’ and when you do that, you kind of relax and inevitably you slow down, and I think that’s what he did at The Corkscrew.

“He braked a touch earlier than normal, and that gave me the opportunity to try to make something normally impossible become possible. At that point, I just took my foot off the brake pedal. The rest was done by luck, I have to admit; but it worked and I won the race!

“Probably,” Zanardi concluded, “the right version should be really in between this one and [teammate] Jimmy Vasser’s. At a sponsor dinner that night he said he’d just listened to this story, and said, ‘Well, you know, guys, what I think happened is just that a plastic bag went onto his shield, and when he peeled it off, he found himself up front!’”

Herta, of course, was not amused, and from the perspective of time feels he would have handled the situation differently. “I see both sides of it now. Obviously it was a big thing at the time, and you don’t want to be the guy who’s on the losing end, so that was tough to take. I really drove a great race, and if I made a mistake, it was not turning in to block him. I think if I had turned in to block him he would have taken us both off the track and Scott Pruett would have won the race, but I would have felt better. If I had it to do again, I’d turn in.”

Vasser won the following year, and in ’98 Herta vindicated himself, holding off Zanardi by less than a second and finally securing his first Champ Car win. Then he won again in ’99, leading green to checker.

“I enjoy the track,” Herta admits. “I think it suits my driving style. People often ask if I have a short cut around there, and I don’t, but I do have a unique driving style that lets me carry a lot of speed to the apex. The nature of the corners is such that, if you can do that, it’s a big key to being fast there. There’s no magic involved, but it’s a track that, once you figure it out, you just kind of get into a rhythm with it.”

The 1997 and ’98 seasons also featured rounds of the FIA’s short-lived World GT Championship, which brought incredibly sophisticated grand touring cars from Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, McLaren and Panoz to the USA. Mercedes’ V-12-powered CLK-GTR proved to be the class of the category, with Klaus Ludwig winning both years, paired first with countryman Bernd Schneider and then Brazil’s Ricardo Zonta.

History Makers

As the new century began, Brazilian Champ Car star Helio Castroneves set the official outright record for the new circuit at 1:07.722sec prior to taking Roger Penske’s Reynard-Honda to victory, and when the newly minted American Le Mans Series made its second appearance at Laguna, Audi’s remarkable R8 prototype kicked off a five-year win streak. Scot Allan McNish teamed with Italian Rinaldo Capello in Y2K, before Frank Biela notched the first of three consecutive triumphs the following year. Emanuele Pirro shared the first two of Biela’s wins, while Marco Werner joined him for the third. Johnny Herbert and Pierre Kaffer bagged the R8’s final triumph in 2004.

That was also the year Quebecois Patrick Carpentier collected his second straight Champ Car win with Gerry Forsythe’s Players Reynard, in what turned out to be the struggling series’ swan song at the track. The next year brought a return of the GP Bikes—having been declared unaffordable a decade before—and once again it was an American taking top honors as Nicky Hayden won with a Honda RC211V.

Another Laguna Seca milestone had occurred in 2001 when Mazda signed an extensive five-year sponsorship deal (recently extended for another five) for naming rights, so that the circuit is now officially known as Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca.

After more than a decade of concentrating its competition efforts on production-based 911 variants, Porsche jumped back into the prototype ranks in 2005. It brought the new RS Spyder to Laguna for its world premiere in concert with Penske Racing—which was making its own return to world class sports car racing. Lucas Luhr and Sascha Maassen won the LMP2 class for Porsche that day while running fifth overall behind the Zytek 045 of Brit youngster Tom Chilton and his Japanese teammate, Hayanari Shimoda.

Last fall, Audi’s revolutionary diesel-powered R10 returned it to the top of the prototype ranks, with McNish and Capello once again victorious at Laguna. A second sports car series had joined the party in 2005, as Grand-Am brought NASCAR-style road racing to the Monterey Peninsula, with Scott Pruett and Luis Diaz taking the win in Chip Ganassi’s Riley-Lexus.

Even though you might figure Laguna Seca had seen everything in its 50 years, when the fledgling A1GP series made a late winter appearance there in March of 2006, the already troubled race weekend was beset by a snowstorm! Happily, most of the crystalline precipitation melted upon contact with the track, but the upper portions of the hills surrounding the facility were unforgettably frosted white. Mexico’s Salvador Duran took the win.

The latest round of FIM-mandated changes took place last year as well, focused on expanding runoff areas. “You know the old Camel press building,” asks Ed Magner, referring to the longtime fixture, driver’s right, just past the start-finish line. “They made us tear that down because the side of the hill was too close to Turn 1. Now if you talk to people who race cars, they’re not even sure where Turn 1 is, but to the motorcycle people, that hill was a mental hazard. No one ever hit it, but it bothered them, so they made us cut the hill back and tear the press building down. Fortunately, Red Bull came in and built that big new hospitality building [on essentially the same site].”

An accompanying repaving was handled improperly, however, and had to be redone, but the bumps didn’t seem to bother Toyota F1 test driver Ricardo Zonta much. During an exhibition run with the team’s TF106 during last August’s Historics weekend, he toured the 2.238-mile circuit in a record time of 1:06.309sec. Zonta’s mark didn’t last long, however, because when the Champ Cars turned up for their “Spring Training” test session this March, triple champion Sebastien Bourdais lowered the unofficial record to 1:05.880sec.

We all probably have our own great tales of Laguna Seca, but as we bring this particular slice of history to a close we’ll let Mario Andretti have the last word: “Laguna is one of those venues where, you not only love to race there, but you love to go there period. It’s a very enjoyable place to go with your family, or bring friends, or entertain sponsors—all of the above. It’s a venue that’s got this 50-year tradition now, and has certainly been a very important part of our road racing in North America.”

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