Laguna Seca Track Map Poster

At the top of the Corkscrew, the road disappears. Laguna Seca fits 55 meters (180 ft) of elevation change into 3.602 km (2.24 miles) of California hillside between Monterey and Salinas, and the world knows it for a single corner: a blind left-right that drops the height of a five-and-a-half-story building in 137 meters (450 ft).

Laguna Seca is Spanish for “dry lake,” and the track was built around one. It opened in 1957, after the road races at Pebble Beach, run between walls of tall pines and cypresses, were abandoned as too dangerous: local businesses and residents paid to give the cars a proper circuit, on army land at Fort Ord once used for maneuvers and artillery practice.

And then there is the Corkscrew. The road climbs to a blind crest at Turn 7; beyond it, the track falls left, then right, steepening from 12 to 18 percent. From the cockpit there is no bottom to see: drivers aim for an oak tree beside the track and let the car drop. By Turn 9 the road has fallen 33 meters (109 ft), more than a ten-story building. On the final lap of a race in 1996, a pass for the win made here, wheels in the dirt, became known simply as The Pass.

Racing games have featured Laguna Seca since the 1990s, and many fans know it by heart. On the poster, all of that becomes a short twist in a clean, counterclockwise loop, every turn numbered and its four names lettered in, from the Andretti Hairpin to Rainey Curve. In Blueprint, the drafting-room edition, it reads like an engineer’s study of a corner measured in gradients. Sooner or later, someone will ask about that little twist. Then you get to tell them about the Corkscrew.