By Paul Harkenrider
(Canandaigua, NY) When Land of Legends promoter, Paul Cole announced the first ever New York Nationals at the 2018 Patriot Sprint Tour awards, it was safe to assume that the event would be huge. The two-day affair will feature triple 15 lap features on Friday, each paying $1000 to win $200 for 10th and $125 to start. The Saturday night A-Main will pay $5000 and $400 to start with $100 DNQ tow money offered.
Friday nights program will line the heats up via open draw at the conclusion of the drivers meeting (No time trials). Passing points will determine the running order for the 15 lap features. All cars from the heats will automatically transfer to an A-Main and no B-Mains will be necessary in this format.
In the event there is less than 36 cars signed in for Friday night, there will only be two 15 lap features and not three. The top two from each Friday night feature will automatically transfer into Saturday nights A-Main Dash.
For Saturday’s program, it will once again be open draw that will determine heat line ups and passing points will be used once again. Heat race winners will transfer to the dash that will determine the first four or five rows of the A-Main. Saturday’s heat races will be ten laps in distance. The top eight drivers in passing points behind the heat winners will also transfer to the A-Main.
The remaining drivers will then go to a B-Main and start heads up from the passing points they accumulated in their heat. If there are two B-Mains, the top three cars will qualify, three b-mains will take the top two. 24 cars will start the feature and there will be no provisional’s offered.
Chuck Hebing, Davie Franek and Paulie Colagiovanni are automatically qualified to the Saturday night main event after A-main event victories at Land of Legends during the regular season.
Saturdays A-Main purse will pay $5,000 to the winner, and $400 just to start which is by far the highest paying purse structure for 360 teams in New York state.
With most of the teams coming from the empire state, there are also teams expected to make the tow from Pennsylvania, New England, Ohio, New Jersey, as well as Ontario and Quebec.
For continued information on the event, please be sure to log onto patriotsprinttour.com and to connect on the series social media programs (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram).