User:Bsoyuz

= 2018 NAAC Season =

The 2018 North American Auto Club Season will be the second season of the North American Auto Club, sanctioning body that split off from the Professional Auto Racing Tour in November of 2016 and had its first season in 2017, achieving great success, while PART ended up going through a severe amount of hardship, unable to secure a series title sponsor, consequently folding in July of the same year. Most of the teams that ran in PART went to NAAC right after the folding of PART, while a few announced their intentions to join the roll in 2018.

The North American Auto Club will sanction four series in 2018: the Cisco Championship Series, Master Spark Eastern/Western Cup and the M-Pire Modified Tour. NAAC will also sanction track championships all over the country under the American Short Track Racing Association moniker.

Event Calendar
The Championship Series is the series that goes through the most changes, as the merger between NAAC and the remains of PART absorbs multiple races of the PART Racing Series, while discarding certain races of the NAAC schedule. The Master Spark Eastern and Western Cups will have two combined races, in Fontana and Las Vegas, opening and closing their seasons together with the Championship Series. Speaking of the Championship Series, with the ballooning of entries following the merger, the series will reintroduce the duel race format for 23 of its 24 events in 2018, adapted for 3 specific events, where three races will happen instead of two. The only race of the year that will not feature the format is the finale in Las Vegas, which will have points paying B-Mains two days before, where the Top 20 will qualify for The Championship Race.

The Eastern and Western Cups will have 11 races each, however, Fontana will have each division having their own race, supporting the Championship Series. Milwaukee will hold the National Championship, a 100-mile race featuring the top 10 of each division after their divisional finales in Ohio and St.Paul. The other nine races will be run regularly by each series, however a few of those events will be companion to the Championship Series. The Modified Tour will be confined mostly to the East and Midwest of America, having 10 events in its innaugural season, ending it in Milwaukee the same weekend of the races between the Championship Series and Regional Cups.

NAAC Cisco Championship Series
Preseason changes

The series adopts a new, cheaper composite bodystyle for this new season. The designs, bulkier and roundier do not resemble any other series' design, with the regulations calling for bigger dimensions and a heavier weight. Teams are barely spending over 50,000 to have a race ready automobile, if they get all parts brand new. Not counting transportation and/or repair, most single car teams are predicted to spend between 100,000 and 300,000 dollars throughtout the whole national tour just to put the cars on track. Six manufacturers will provide models for the 2018 composite car, being those models the Saar Carolina, Inglesby Bolero, Lenard Cheyenne R20, Lycoia Interceptor, Nemoto Respetti and the Calton-Morel Nova.

The race format used in APRS/PART prior to the split in 2015 and 2016 returns, as the increase in entries made the Drivers and Team Council consider a "no full-time car fails to qualify for a race" rule, where two or three races will be contested over the weekend, each being half or a third of the total advertised distance. A equal portion of the field will contest one of the races, while the other portion(s) contest the remaining race(s). The field for each race will be defined by the results of the previous weekend, except for the opening round in California, where the odd position qualifiers will be in Round 1 and the even qualifiers contest Round 2, and in Las Vegas where the qualifiers between 3-22 plus the qualifiers from the C and D-Mains 1 (as the front row will be locked in after the time trials and won't contest the B-Mains) run B-Main 1 and positions 23-42 plus the qualifiers from the C and D-Mains 2 will race B-Main 2, the top 20 of each B-Main enters The Championship Race.


 * Numbers in blue denote a part-time car
 * Names followed by an asterisk denote a X-Auto.com Rookie of the Year contender