2013 ARLA Elite Series season

The 2013 ARLA Elite Series season is the 41st and upcoming season of the ARLA Elite Series, presented by Smash Beer.

Preseason changes
For the first time, teams will be permitted to have two drivers use the same car to compete for the championship together. Among the teams running shared cars are Pearson/Sweeney Motorsports, Gravity Racing, Inc., Kurt Walker Motorsports, and Green Racing.

The Tornado Alley Trophy was introduced as an exclusively short track-oriented championship, consisting of its own class of cars competing alongside the Elite Series regulars in a certain number of races within the tornado alley region of the United States. It is believed that the idea behind the Tornado Alley Trophy was to give short track teams something to compete for without having to travel as much as the series regulars. However, some of the more established teams also are fielding their own entries in the Tornado Alley Trophy.

Inline-four engines are approved to compete alongside the V6s for the first time since 1993. The typically lower cost of an L4 is expected to be very attractive for the low-budget teams, but it comes at the cost of lower power. However, the L4s have historically been much lighter than the V6s, making them competitive on tracks where cornering speed is more important than power.

Schedule
Only a few events have been revealed so far, but of note is a second race on Independence Day at Rockford Speedway. The Rockford promoters reportedly saw the Mini-Indy 500 as a rival, and asked ARLA executives for a second race in order to increase their presence in the series.

There is also the possibility of "split weekends", in which the first round of a race is held at one track, and the second round is held at a different track fewer than 200 miles away. This idea has been tossed around as a way to fit more tracks on the schedule without ballooning it to more than 30 different race weekends.

The Japanese tour in 2012 was seen as a success, and is almost guaranteed to return in 2013. RUS Autosport team boss Vitaly Tsolikov reportedly took note of the Japanese tour's success, and has offered to pay the teams a large sum of money to hold a points race somewhere in Russia. ARLA executives are also confirmed to be in talks with promoters from a few Mexican tracks.

The sanctioning body is expected to introduce new caps on field sizes at different track types. The numbers most widely speculated on are 26 starters at road courses, 28 at ovals shorter than 1 mile long, and 34 at ovals greater than 1 mile long. However, some tracks that are likely to get on the schedule may not even have enough space to hit these caps. Special events such as the Mini-Indy 500 and the Rockford 200 are expected to have their own caps.


 * Blue squares indicate a road/street course event.
 * Yellow squares indicate a Tornado Alley Trophy event.

Tentative team chart
The provisional team chart is made up of confirmed lineups, deals in the works, and baseless speculation.

About 40 teams are expected to show up for every North American race, with several more teams opting to run partial schedules. This is similar to how teams operated in the early years of the sport, when about half of the field in each race was made up of one-off cars. It is not certain how many teams are expected to show up for the Japanese (and potentially Russian) races.

Numbers in blue indicate an entry that isn't expected to run the full schedule.

Numbers in green indicate a shared championship entry.

Numbers in yellow indicate a Tornado Alley Trophy entry.

An asterisk indicates that the driver is an R-Kuh Brakes Rookie of the Year candidate.

2013 Points System

 * 5 bonus points goes to the race's polesitter.
 * 5 bonus points goes to the driver who leads the most laps in a race.
 * In 2012, drivers who failed to finish a race scored no points. This rule may be changed after it created a lopsided points battle.