| Category | Online racing |
|---|---|
| Country or region | International |
| Inaugural season | 2010 |
| Official website | NASCAR.com, iRacing.com |
The NASCAR iRacing.com Series are online oval racing series officially sanctioned by NASCAR and hosted by iRacing.com. In 2010 they include seven different series in total, with a World Championship series, a qualifying series for the championship and five amateur series.
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The partnership between iRacing.com and NASCAR was originally announced on May 19, 2009, but its roots can be traced back more than 15 years to an idea of Bill France, Jr., then head of NASCAR.[1] A similar but short-lived online series with official NASCAR support, called the NASCAR Racing Online Series (NROS), was organized already in the late 1990s using the infrastructure of Total Entertainment Network (TEN) with the NASCAR Racing 2 PC simulation software by Papyrus Design Group.[2] Papyrus was co-founded by David Kaemmer, also the co-founder and current CEO of iRacing.com.
The details of the series were revealed during the 2010 NASCAR Sprint Media Tour hosted at the Charlotte Motor Speedway.[3]
Currently the NASCAR iRacing.com series include seven series in total. Five of them, the "amateur" series, are part of the standard iRacing.com competition program and open to anyone progressing through the standard license levels used in iRacing. A minimum of 250 of the top oval drivers can take part in the NASCAR iRacing Pro Series (NPS), which in turn serves as a qualifying series for the NASCAR iRacing World Championships (NDWC), reserved for the 50 best drivers.
The NiWCS is the top oval racing series in iRacing.com.
The NiPS is the qualifying series for the NDWC. Currently, the second season is open to the top 300 oval track drivers on iRacing. Josh Parker won the inaugural championship in 2009 before this series was NASCAR affiliated for 2010.
The first season of the NiPS was open to the top 250 oval track drivers on iRacing.
The NASCAR-iRacing.com partnership includes six "amateur" series that have no limits on the number of participants. Currently they include (from top to bottom) online versions of the Sprint Cup, Nationwide Series (with a shorter, locked setup spin-off series) and Camping World Truck Series, as well as a Whelen Modified Tour, a slower SK Modified series and the generically named (paved) Late Model series. The six series are organized like other standard series on iRacing.com, following a week by week schedule for the 12 week 'season', with races every couple of hours. The NASCAR series have proven to be very popular with the service's users, with the NASCAR IRacing.com C Class Series (Camping World Trucks) and the NASCAR IRacing.com Late Model D Class Series being the 3rd and 4th biggest series (by participation) respectively, despite relatively high incident rates.
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