The United States Pro Kart Series (USPKS) presented by MG Tires, IAME USA East, and Louisiana Grills, is pleased to announce revisions in the weekend format regarding practice and qualifying.

The following are format changes for the remainder of the 2022 USPKS season:

  • Qualifying will be moved back to the same day as their respective round instead of hosting both sessions at the end of Friday. The qualifying sessions for each round will be placed in the time slot immediately following morning warmup on both Saturday and Sunday.
  • Official Practice sessions on Friday will begin at 9:30am and allow for five rounds of practice with the fifth session hosting the ‘Happy Hour’. The Happy Hour session will determine driver order for the Qualifying sessions on both Saturday and Sunday.
  • All classes, with the exception of KA100 Senior and KA100 Junior, will be capped at a single session and all karts will start the Main Events. The KA classes will still use a split Prefinal format (ODD / EVEN) after qualifying and contest a Last Chance Qualifier race – similar to the opening two events of the 2022 if the entries warrant it.

USPKS believes strongly in continuous improvement, and at the Carolina Grand Prix event at the GoPro Motorplex, series owner Mark Coats and Operations Manager Tim Koyen talked to numerous drivers and team owners about the format used for the first two events. The overwhelming response was that nearly everyone preferred Qualifying sessions be held on the same day as racing.

“I always say that we listen to the racers, and the racers said they like it better the old way,” commented Coats. “We moved Qualifying to Friday to make room for more entries in more classes, so this will likely cost us entries, but it’s worth it to me to keep our customers happy.  Tim is our ‘Timeline guy’, and he has put in a lot of hours calculating different proposed formats, and this is the one that we just keep coming back to as the best overall for USPKS and its racers.”

A draft timeline for the Road America event will be posted as soon as is reasonably possible, however, the class order will be the same as the Southern Grand Prix event in Orlando for those early planners.