I found myself chief of tech at an early season SCCA double regional at Lime Rock a week and a half ago.
Early season regionals tend to be really awful for tech. The recent SCCA inspection system (which we are starting to move away from) pushed car inspections towards the beginning of the calendar year, causing long and painful tech lines. This meant that a mid-May race at Lime Rock was usually a truly awful experience for all concerned, lots of cars deserving proper inspection, not enough qualified inspectors, and race group 1 due on the track for their first practice & qualifying session at 10am.
I wasn't looking forward to it at all. The new system (rolling annual tech, good for a full 12 months, not locked down to the first of the year) will make things easier, but we're not really into it yet. Annual inspections will tend to be front loaded in the year for some time to come.
So I got down there, worried, and set up Thursday night. What I heard was that the turnout was light, and this was true. It was a very lightly attended race, and running tech for it was rather easy. Good for me, not good at all for the host region, which took a serious financial beating.
So what happened? From where I sit (which is not in anyone's inner circle these days), it's a combination of two things. The first is holding a Double Regional at Lime Rock sandwiched between the traditional Mother's Day double at Pocono and a Double Regional up at NHIS, on a weekend that is traditionally a Lime Rock National (the National and Regional crowds being somewhat different, only mildly overlapping, groups of racers.) On top of that, substantial increases in track rent have forced entry fees at Lime Rock up a great deal, rendering race weekends there rather unattractive (especially jammed in a 3 weekend stretch of double-double-double.)
I should think that if things don't change, we might see fewer SCCA weekends at Lime Rock in the very near future.