Even though the rumor mill had been churning for quite some time regarding us moving to a Friday Qualifying format in 2020, the announcement caught some people off guard. Unexpectedly, this meant that a handful of people were put into a position where they may not be able to attend.
There have been a few people that have reached out to tell us that for a multitude of reasons, taking the extra day off of work was not an option. Quite a few of them sited the Corona Virus restrictions at work, in which their employers had blocked off any additional days off requests. Given these crazy times, we wanted to figure out a way to make sure that these drivers could still compete. The last thing we wanted to do was let the virus cause somebody to miss the biggest 4-cycle event of 2020.
Therefore, we will be adding in a limited “Late Arrivals Qualifying” session to Saturday morning’s schedule. Here are the stipulations to be permitted into that session:
- Drivers cannot have put a tire on the track in any way on Friday, in any kart or any class. Their karts must also sit idle and not used at all on Friday.
- Friday qualifying must take place in dry conditions. If Friday qualifying takes place in the rain, there will be no late arrival qualifying on Saturday.
These drivers will only be allowed to participate in the one warmup session on Saturday before they set a time in the “Late Arrivals Qualifying” session. We want to guarantee that there is no advantage to qualifying on Saturday, therefore drivers coming out of this session will have a limit set on how far up the field they can qualify. We will use the lap time they set in this qualifying session, but there will be a limit on their starting spot based on the number of participants in their class:
- 20 drivers or less = up to 7th place
- 30 drivers or less = up to 9th place
- 31 or more drivers = up to 11th place