eNASCAR iRacing Pro Invitational Series

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eNASCAR iRacing Pro Invitational Series

Category	Sim racing / eSports
Country	United States
Inaugural season	2020

The eNASCAR iRacing Pro Invitational Series is a series of iRacing sim racing events originally organized for NASCAR drivers to compete in after its 2020 seasons were put on hold due to the coronavirus pandemic.^[1] Drivers from all of NASCAR's series competed in races, including Hall of Fame drivers Dale Earnhardt Jr., Bobby Labonte, and Jeff Gordon. Originally supposed to be a one-time event (the first race of the 2020 season at Homestead-Miami, it quickly became a weekly series, and later included the Saturday Night Thunder series of races for drivers in the lower series of NASCAR. In each race, the series races on virtual versions of the racetracks.

In 2020, the tracks run were the ones that the NASCAR Cup Series would have raced at that weekend had the real races not been postponed due to COVID, except for the final race at North Wilkesboro, a former NASCAR track which last hosted a NASCAR race in 1996, to launch the track joining iRacing. On January 26, 2021, NASCAR and iRacing announced the Pro Invitational Series would return in 2021 to compensate for a reduced schedule for NASCAR's three national series, as the majority of race weekends will only feature races without any practice or qualifying. The events will be mid-week (primarily Wednesday night) events featuring upcoming circuits, especially with the 2021 schedule featuring numerous new road courses, an intermediate oval, and a dirt track being added. Three of the five Fox events will feature new circuits or with considerable changes—Bristol (dirt), Darlington (switches to the high horsepower, low downforce package instead of the reduced horsepower, high downforce package), and Austin—along with the popular Talladega round and a race at the Chicago Street Course.^[2]

Teams and drivers[]

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Drivers from the NASCAR Cup Series participated in the main events. In the first two races (at Homestead-Miami and Texas), drivers from all NASCAR series were invited to participate. However, once the Texas race had a massive entry list of 63 cars, almost half of which did not even get to race in the main event, it was announced that a separate series of races, Saturday Night Thunder, would be added for drivers in all of NASCAR's lower series (the Xfinity Series, Truck Series, ARCA Menards Series, the ARCA East and ARCA West Series, the Pinty's Series, the Mexico Series, and the Whelen Modified Tour) except for the NASCAR Whelen Euro Series, which had their own iRacing series.

Schedule[]

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The 2021 season premiered on March 24 with the race at Bristol Motor Speedway on dirt. The other four races to air during the Fox half are in Talladega, Darlington, Circuit of the Americas, and a fictitious street course in the streets of Chicago. Those five races are all on Fox. NBC will air the second half of the eNASCAR iRacing Pro Invitational Series in 2021, and they have yet to determine the five tracks that their races will be on and the dates of each of those races.

Rule changes[]

After cars were allowed two resets if they became damaged during the race at Homestead, it was decreased to only one reset allowed for the Texas race.

Not all Cup Series drivers were locked into the main event at Texas, as Joey Gase, Brennan Poole, and J. J. Yeley were placed in the qualifying race and had to attempt to race their way in.^[3]

The Saturday Night Thunder race from Bristol used gen-4 (old style) ARCA cars. This changed for the next one of those races at Richmond, where Xfinity Series cars were used.^[4]

Media[]

It was announced that Fox, which normally carries this part of the NASCAR's racing season, would broadcast all iRacing Pro Invitational Series events,^[5] which fall in a portion of the timeslots where the actual races would have been at. Fox's booth announcers Mike Joy and Jeff Gordon broadcast from Fox's NASCAR studio in Charlotte, North Carolina, which would also serve as the broadcast headquarters for main booth commentators (who did not travel to the racetracks) when real-life competition resumed.^[6]

The Saturday Night Thunder races and the qualifying race for the race at Texas were not televised on Fox and were instead livestreamed on NASCAR's YouTube channel, and the commentators for the eNASCAR Coca-Cola iRacing Series events, play-by-play , and color commentators Tim Terry and Justin Prince, served as the broadcast team for those races.

In 2021, Fox, which broadcast all of the races in the series in 2020, would be joined by NBC, the other channel that broadcasts real-life NASCAR races, this season, with each channel airing five races apiece. Fox and NBC would choose the racetracks that their races would be on.

Television viewership[]

903,000 viewers watched the first race at Homestead, while 1,339,000 watched the second race at Texas. These races became the most-watched eSports broadcasts ever.^[7]

See also[]

References[]