Organizers Present Possible PRO/AM Championships for the '17 Fall Season

The main goal of DGFX is to join the ranks of NEO and GES, two of the biggest road racing series on the iRacing service, in providing one of the best championships on the service but to target the teams who might not have the speed to contend for either of those championships. Middle to back pack teams in GES and NEO would be front runners in DGFX with teams who do not feel they would have a chance or belong in either of those series being the mid to back pack contenders in our series. We also want to be one of, if not the only, the main road racing series on service that utilizes FCYs which separates us from others. In the attempt to give the bottom half of our field something to fight for as the season progresses, DGFX Organizers have come up with a possible PRO/AM Championship formats for the coming season.

Currently in the '17 Spring Season an average of 21 teams scoring championship points in each class and with the possibility of running just 2 classes in the future resulting in about 30 cars in each class, the bottom half of the cars in each class sometimes are out of the championship hunt after only 2 races. As we do not want to scare away the mid to back pack teams as well as don't want to have them feel like they are running just to get a top 10 finish, we have thought about introducing an AM Championship into the series.

Now some might think that "wont that just make it 6 classes instead of 3 which could be only 10 in each class size and it would spread the classes too thin?" Well the short answer to that is a simple, no. This is simply taking our currently championship as is and just adding another championship on the side for those mid to back pack teams. There wouldn't be any different BoP or cars for those in the AM Championship.

If you have ever heard of, participated in, or watched the Pacific Majors on iRacing they do something similar. In their series anyone who races is in the series is scoring points for the Drivers Championship (think of this as our PRO Championship) regardless of iRating. Now if you race in the series and if your iRating is less than 2000 you are now eligible and automatically entered in the Sportsman Division (think of this as our AM Championship). Anyone in the Sportsman Division automatically scores points for the Drivers Championship since they are racing in the series but in most cases, they are really competing for the Sportsman Division and not the Driver's Championship.

To determine the team's iRating we would take the top three iRatings of the registered drivers on the team and average them. If there are only two or three drivers on the team it would only be those two or three that we use. If there are more than three drivers we would take the top three drivers. This way it eliminates the possibility of teams registering a driver with a very low iRating to bring down the average just to make them eligible for the AM Championship.

For examples purposes, we will take a look at the '17 Spring Season and implement this championship as a test (see the link below for the points). The average team iRating, including all of the drivers on each team of the SoF, currently is 2986. As a educated choice to try and find the bottom 45% of the teams iRating in the series, we chose to use 2700 as our benchmark for this purpose, meaning any team with a team iRating below 2700 would be eligible for the AM Championship. This is not locked in as the mark we would use but is just a baseline for this test.

Using the method described earlier 6 Prototype teams, 10 GT teams, and 10 GTC teams would be eligible for the AM Championship. Out of those 26 teams, only 5 teams (3 GT, 2 GTC) are currently in the top 10 in points in their respective class (PRO Championship) with the highest of those in 6th place. The rest of those teams are outside the top 10 but more importantly in the bottom half of the championship (mid to back pack teams). We have taken those 26 teams and looked at their points currently. The first points table shows the points they earned in what would be the PRO Championship, or the current class championship. The second table is giving them points based on where they finished out of the AM Championship contenders with our current point table. The final table is just based on giving them a point per position with 10 points being the highest. These three tables are to just show the possible, not definite, championship points with different ways of issuing points.

'17 Spring AM Championship Test

Again, introducing the AM Championship gives those teams a different goal to race for in the later half of the season. Instead of just saying "OK let's see if we can finish inside of the top 10" they can now say "OK we are in a title contention with these two teams and our goal is to finish ahead of them. Finishing in the top 10 in class would be an extra bonus." The perks of winning the AM Championship would be that they get an automatic entry fee paid spot in the following season. If by some chance an AM team finishing in the top 3 in the PRO Championship, the second place team in the AM Championship would get the automatic entry.

As you can see with this example, we have now given five or six more teams something to be racing for at the end of the season instead of racing for that top 10 finish.

This championship is not finalized and still in the process of being thought of and implemented but we have a general baseline of what we are striving for. Feel free to comment with your thoughts below or if you are a participant on the forums or on Discord in the "proam_discussion" text thread.