Season 16 - Early Preview

Hello Patreons!

Thank you for your support over the last year, you've helped us build something amazing for all racers everywhere, and starting from Season 16, you'll get an early preview of what's to come next season!

Key Dates:

Season 16 start date: 12th January 2023

Season 16 Leagues Start: 25th January 2023 (GT Challenge - Round 1)

Overall Ranked Season Changes

Season Length

Starting from Season 16, our season length will be 12 weeks, with the endurance falling on the first week and a brand new special event falling on the 12th week.

The standard leagues will run from Week 2 and end on Week 11 of the season, be sure to read the league information below as to why this is and what it means!

Tracks

Below are the tracks, for season 16!

Ranked Daily/Hourly Races

As of Season 15.5, Hourly races have been removed, this was due to low turnout and people maybe not fully understand what is required and how many drivers are required to race in them, we discussed it as a staffing team and decided to reorganise the daily/weekly calendar so that drivers can race from one race to the next similar to the Hourly races and also have an "increasing difficulty" each night, as to not replace the full daily schedule.

Below is the revised schedule, a real graphic will be out after the early preview.

Ranked Weekly Races

We've been reviewing the weekly series during 15.5 and for Season 16 the following changes will be made:

Monitoring

Throughout the season, we will be monitoring the driver numbers in all of our Weekly Races, and they will all have the PitSkill-based points assigned to them, so you can be champion of any of the series that run here on PitSkill, however, if we notice that a series has less than 10 drivers, it will be brought to our attention as a staffing team of what needs to change if it's a format, cars, etc issue.

Maximum Grid Sizes

For Season 16, a maximum 1 SPLIT grid size of 32 will be applied, apart from for the GT3 Advanced series which will be set to 40, we will no longer be splitting any events and it's a first come, first served basis, so signing up as early as possible is the key to ensuring you've got your position on the grid.

Monday: GT3 Advanced

FORMAT & REQUIREMENTS

These will be going back to the 45min "Daily" format that used to run every Monday, however, they will have an entry requirement of a MINIMUM of 2 races within our community before you can take part in them, this is due to us removing the ability for the grids to split, we will also be listing it as "C Class" on PitSkill, however, due to how SGP works, we currently can't limit it to only "C Class" drivers if they try to signup through SGP, hence the MINIMUM 2 RACE requirement.

Tuesday: Porsche Cup

The Porsche Cup Series will be staying for Season 16, with no minimum entry requirements.

Thursday: BMW MW2

The BMW M2 series will be staying for Season 16, with no minimum entry requirements.

Friday: GT4 Series

The GT4 Series will have a slight change next season after Kunos's latest BoP change for ACC, we've decided to allow ALL GT4 to race in the series across the season, with the PitSkill points being put in place for this series as well.

Sunday: GT3 Amateurs

The GT3 Amateurs Series will be starting next season, with the format catering for "Amateur Drivers" as it was previously, with the "Pro" Drivers (>1000 PitSkill) not gaining points for the series, however still able to race and it still affect their PitSkill and PitRep, but won't count for the series.

Full Weekly Races Calendar

Ranked League Races

If you have keen eyes, you may have already seen us open up our leagues for Season 16, we've further increased the range of our PitSkill leagues allowing us to increase the reach of drivers who can race on a regularly scheduled championship... Leagues are where most of the changes we've put in place will happen and are slightly different from last season, let's take a look at them.

Attendance Requirements

We've removed the attendance requirements where you had to attend every round of the championship or end up losing points, we've also removed the auto-banning system that used to happen, as drivers weren't being replaced in the leagues as they went through the weeks, as we run many series which are sign up for each race, we decided to implement DROPPED ROUND SCORING instead.

Dropped Round Scoring

For most leagues, there will be 2-3 dropped rounds per season, meaning that if you have a couple of bad races or can't make it for a couple of weeks, you still have the chance of winning, we'll be adding the information into the series information on PitSkill before the start of next week for everyone to see!

League Length (Rounds)

We're increasing the length of the leagues to 10 rounds across the season, this will match our seasonal changes for 2023 onwards.

Limited Slots & Minimum Signups

For most leagues, limited slots are now in effect with the top 40 drivers being able to race in the leagues and them requiring minimum signups to start the season, this is to show our staffing members that we're required to be in attendance for the championship, if it does not reach the minimum requirements before the final classification, the championship will be cancelled, so ensure to tell your friends and get those grids past the minimum signup requirements!

Leagues of Season 16

Unranked - Endurance Races & Special Events

Endurance Calendar

The endurance calendar will follow a similar format to last year, however we've now brought on 2 brand new endurance managers who will be organising the endurance, if you've been around over the holiday period, you'll have filled out the survey that helped them bring about the changes they have which will be detailed below:

Mandatory Team Captains Briefing

A mandatory briefing for all Team Captains will be held in discord, with all captains checked to ensure they are in the briefing, as these are expected to join the server first, it's expected they'll be around before the race as well, other drivers may join, however they are not REQUIRED to be there.

Practice Servers

Solo Practice

There will be solo practice servers will be launched 2 weeks in advance of the race, hotlaps WILL NOT count on these servers, so ensure not to join them until you're qualified.

Teams Practice

A team practice server using the qualified entry list from 7 days before the event will be launched, if you are not qualified and have not cemented your team before the server launches, you WILL NOT be able to join this server, so we recommend you to get your laps in as early as possible to get an advantage over the competition, this will have the EXACT weather settings of the race server.

Classes

If the event reaches over 75% full, we will implement a class-based system during the race, so you are able to see where the other teams qualified whilst racing around the track, this will be shown on the in-game leaderboards and will be based on the hotstint times of the drivers/teams.

Endurance Calendar

The following are the confirmed events for the endurance next year, with all of them running as "separate" events, rather than in a championship.

R1 - Monza 6hr - January 14th.
R2 - Watkins Glen 9 Hour (~8th April)
R3 - Silverstone 12 Hour (2x Time) (~1st July)
R4 - Suzuka 12 Hour (~23rd September)
R5 - Kyalami 9 Hour (~16th December)

Race Start Times

Race start times will be moved to roughly 1400 UTC, allowing for it to be in a better position for not just EU drivers, but America's drivers as well!

Special Events

We will be releasing information regarding the season's special event during the season, so keep an eye out on your notifications to find out what's to come!

What's to come?

Partner Series & Events & New Developments

We have more announcements for you regarding our Partner Series & events, as well as some information on what we're going to be working on this year, including those endurance rankings you've been asking for, but we'll be detailing that in another post coming soon!

A thank you..

Thank you again for all of your support in 2022, and we hope the above changes allow us to allow you to get more races in, enjoy your time out on track as well as give you the best racing experience we possibly can, 2023 is going to be a year full of races and we hope you're going to be with us every step of the way!