Another lawsuit over Laguna Seca’s safety as season begins.

After a few days of rain, the weather let up on March 15, 2016, for a sunny day at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca. Mariusz Dziurzynski, a San Francisco motorcycle enthusiast, joined others for Keigwin’s track day, a recurring event that leases tracks in California for nonprofessional drivers to learn on and enjoy. Dziurzynski sped through his second lap on a rented Kawasaki motorcycle, until he reached Turn 3. When Dziurzynski realized he wasn’t going to make the turn, he pulled into a runoff area, a safety zone along the track designed to decelerate speeding vehicles.

But he traveled through the runoff area, only to encounter a ditch, where the front wheel of his motorcycle got caught. Dziurzynski was ejected from his bike and landed on an exposed pipe. The result: 4 inches of shattered femur bones, a broken ankle, two surgeries, a month in bed and three months of physical therapy.

So he alleges in a lawsuit filed March 10 in Monterey County Superior Court against Monterey County (because Laguna Seca is a county park) and the Sports Car Racing Association of the Monterey Peninsula (SCRAMP), the nonprofit that has long operated the track. Dziurzynski claims SCRAMP failed to properly maintain the track to adequate safety standards when he crashed.

It’s the second similar complaint in two years. Almost a year to the day before Dziurzynski crashed, Daniel Kim also crashed his bike at Keigwin’s 2015 track day. Kim’s bike collapsed on top of him after his motorcycle hit sandbags – an intended safety measure – on Turn 5. In a 2016 lawsuit, Kim made a similar case against SCRAMP and the county. That case is still pending.

Andy Swartz, the Monterey-based attorney representing SCRAMP, says some accidents are to be expected, especially at a nonprofessional event. “Obviously high-speed motorcycling by an amateur motorcyclist is a dangerous activity,” Swartz writes by email. He denies claims that the track was improperly maintained, and says the odds of accidents increase when inexperience of amatuer riders combines with unfamiliarity of a rented bike.

But Kim claims he was on his own bike and Dziurzynski’s attorney, Oakland-based Bradley Bostick, says it wasn’t his client’s first time on the Laguna Seca track. SCRAMP’s management of the track creates “the kind of condition that has repeatedly been at the heart of safety complaints,” Bostick writes by email.

In January, the Monterey County Board of Supervisors agreed to continue its relationship with SCRAMP as the concessionaire at Laguna Seca for another three years, after a national search for alternative track operators that included a proposal from Daytona, Florida-based International Speedway Corporation, which owns or operates 13 tracks. The county supervisors were concerned about who could pay millions in deferred track maintenance, and on March 14, agreed to invest $1.7 million of county funds to repair drainage issues and winter storm-related damage.

“We needed somebody who knew the track well,” County Supervisor Simon Salinas says of the decision to keep SCRAMP.

Under the new agreement, the county has hired SCRAMP to run events, and the nonprofit will get paid more as an incentive to run efficient, high-grossing events, like Superbike World Championship and Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion; the county will pay SCRAMP 20 percent of net earnings from events, per the agreement.