We are ready and firing on all cylinders for Season 12 of our close, clean, competitive sim racing championships and as is general tradition, we’ll detail all the changes we’ve been investing time to here at ThePitCrew, to make this season EVEN BETTER than the last!
Release of PitSkill
PitSkill is our brand new driver dashboard, enabling you to see all of your stats, take part and compete in hot lap leaderboards, time-trials, keep track of your PitRating, manage your liveries and sign up for our GT3 World Challenge Championship, as well as much more!
You can check out PitSkill right here: https://pitskill.thepitcrew.co.uk
Definitions of Events/Series/Championships
Open Championships
If a championship/series is marked as “Open” this means that it is not required to do pre-qualifying to enter it and it’s OPEN to everyone to participate in with a mixed ability grid, however, to be live-stewarded and live-streamed, it requires at least 20 drivers.
Main Championships
If a championship/series is not marked as Open, i.e the GT3 World Challenge, there is mandatory pre-qualifying and you will be matched into splits based on your PitRating.
Championship Information
We’ve been looking at what’s worked and what hasn’t in the first part of 2022, and including in that, is the GT3 World Challenge and the GT3 AM Championship as well as the GT3 Monday Double Dash, we’ll be continuing to bring you great racing and we’ve thought of some brilliant changes which will help that!
Summary of Changes
Full details on these changes are in their respective sections below.
- Registration for all championships can be found on PitSkill.
- New Driver Dashboard is now available on PitSkill.
- Pre-qualifying requirements are now detailed for each of the GT3 World Challenge and GT3 Amateur/Rookie Championship.
- All tracks for the championships align each week, meaning you only need to practice one.
- Splits are based on PitRating, the higher your PitRating, the higher your split.
- Hotstints are pre-qualifying requirements, they have no impact on your split.
- All drivers must complete atleast 2 Ranked Races during pre-season to qualify for the broadcasted championships.
- Drivers will be prioritised next season based on their attendance percentage if there’s not enough drivers to fill multiple splits.
- There are 4 Ranked Races per week to participate in during off-season, you must participate in ALTEAST 2 and meet the requirements to race in the championship.
- Each weeks worth of ranked races will be released on Sunday, with 24 slots per race at a total of 96 per week, spaces are limited.
- The final round of racing is now voted for by the viewers on our twitch channel for ALL CHAMPIONSHIPS.
- All event start times in championships will move back 30minutes in UTC to account for the daylight savings times.
- Drivers can continue to compete in Ranked Races to climb their way up the tier classification.
GT3 Open Championship
The Monday Double Dash championship is changing for next season, with a re-structured signup process, the brand new, GT3 Open Championship will replace the Monday Double Dash championship and will remove the requirement for Pre-Qualifying, allowing ANYONE who’s able to attend the rounds to sign up.
The GT3 Open Championship is aimed at drivers that either want to extend their driving for that week on the track or who don’t want to participate in pre-qualifying but still want live-stewarded and live-streamed championships with attendance requirements.
What are the changes for the GT3 Open Championship this season?
- Removal of pre-qualification
- Alternating race types, 45 minutes and 2x 30 minute races alternating each week.
- Follows the same track cycle as the GT3 World Challenge.
- Live Stewarded and Live Streamed if above 20 drivers.
- Only one class to participate in, however points for EVERY position.
- Max Grid Slots of 40.
- PitSkill Ratings awarded in every race.
- Slots awarded on a First-Come, First-Served basis.
- No Reserve slots, sign up if there’s a spot, or keep checking!
The GT3 World Challenge
The GT3 World Challenge will now be open to ALL drivers, as we will be using a brand new PitSkill sign up process to determine your splits.
When registering, you will be presented with the requirements for the championship, you must complete ALL of these requirements to be qualified for the championship, your splits will then be decided by your PitRating.
Track / Event Configuration changes.
The tracks will also be the same for the GT3 World Challenge Split Tiers, as well as the GT3 World Amateur tier, meaning that no matter which you’re driving in, you can get involved in the Track of the Week (TOTW) time trial, or the Ranked Racing Series as they will all follow the same format.
Weather
The GT3 World Challenge Splits will feature weather changes as well as rain chances in every event and day/night changes of when the event starts.
The GT3 Amateur Tier will feature static weather, and some, day/night changes.
NEW this season – TRACK VOTING!
New this season for the GT3 Championships is that the final round for both the AM and Split Tiers, will now feature a TRACK VOTING SYSTEM on the GT3 World Challenge MAIN EVENT each week on Wednesday on our twitch stream at https://twitch.tv/thepitcrewtv.
All viewers will be able to vote each week on the “finale” of the season, which will be a double-points double-sprint format, similar to our finale event from Season 11 of the GT3 World Challenge, the track and format will be used for all championships.
What are the changes for the GT3 World Challenge this season?
- GT3 World Challenge now has unlimited “split” capabilities, either in the same event by classes, or across multiple events.
- Track and event configuration changes, more randomness for higher tiers, no/low randomness for lower tiers.
- All tracks now match across all CHAMPIONSHIPS, which will allow more drivers to participate in the Time Trial – Track of the Week or the Ranked Weekly Events, or more championships in the same car, due to lower practice requirements across different tracks.
- Viewers Vote on the Final Event of the season throughout the season, with the final event being a 30min Double Dash with Double Points on offer.
GT3 Amateur/Rookie League
The GT3 Amateur / Rookie league is back, and we’re changing it up a little bit, but it should make it easier for you to participate in multiple championships over the week, allowing us to give you more events of your choosing and still allowing for you to choose which days you race on!
Please read the GT3 World Challenge change log for how this may affect you, all rookies/amateurs are required to complete the pre-qualifying to get their invite onto the grid!
Open Series
Our Open Multi-Class Series of which we had the first season of last season every Friday, went down, swimmingly (mind the pun), and we’ll be looking at running it again, built by Ryan Ware again this season.
Not much will change with the Open Multi-Class series, however with the release of some new cars coming on the 23rd of March it’s highly likely we’ll see some of those make their appearance when the season starts, so if you’d like to try them out, that’s a perfect time to do so, the events will follow the same structure as last time, with 60 & 90-minute races available for everyone to participate in.
We’ll also of course be post-race stewarding the events as was previous.
There may be some sporadic live streams depending on signup numbers and availability from our commentators!
PitSkill Events
We’ve looked at the Driver Numbers for the PitSkill evaluation events, and believe that right now, we can only run them on Tuesdays as we have to manually set them up and create them.
Assetto Corsa PitSkill Events
We will be removing the Assetto Corsa evaluation events due to them never having enough drivers to start, sorry Assetto Corsa players, we try to bring events, but without “buy-in” from the community, it’s not worth it to use the time to create them.
Assetto Corsa Competizione PitSkill Events
During the season, these will run EVERY TUESDAY for you to gain and improve your PitRating as well as practice with the track in a race format, or with the weather randomness settings that we will use for the full season for the higher tiers of the GT3 World Challenge and the GT3 Open Championship.
During pre-season, these will run EVERY OTHER DAY (on our main championship days) and anyone looking to compete in the GT3 World Challenge or Amateur Cup, no matter the tier/license, will have to compete in a mandatory of ATLEAST 2 ( the more the better for your PitRating ) evaluation events, for us to place you correctly within your tiers.
There is no mandatory requirement for the GT3 Open Championship, however, we recommend everyone competes in PitSkill events so you can get your racing license, or improve your PitRating
Closing Words
We’ve looked at what worked and what didn’t work last season and previous seasons and we believe this structure, with the minimal changes we’ve done, will allow for every driver to be able to compete where they want, without the added pressure of having to practice extra tracks.
We really hope you enjoy the changes we’ve done to this season and it enables to you be able to not only compete in more events if you choose to, but also for you to be able to have close, clean, competitive racing across the whole week!