NASA National Rally Championship
The NRS National Rally Championship is paused for now but will make a return when appropriate! Previous details can be found below.
There are currently two National Qualifying Series:Origin
NASA Rally Sport began operation in 2003, and for the first decade of its existence, it had no official national championship. In 2013, after ten years of sanctioning rallies all over the country, NASA Rally Sport decided it was time to crown a national champion and the NASA National Rally Championship (NNRC) was born. This National Rally Championship was created as, and remains, distinctly unlike a traditional championship.
The common motor-sports championship is a long season of attending multiple events and accumulating performance points. In essence, a traditional approach rewards attendance and steady performance. These are admiral qualities; but, when NASA Rally Sport created the NNRC they wanted driving brilliance to matter and they didn't want budget to stop competitors from taking a shot at the championship. In a traditional championship format, no matter how good a driver is, that person cannot win the championship if he/she does not have the money to crisscross the country multiple times and attend all the championship events.
The key to the NASA National Rally Championship's accessibility is the multiple qualifying methods available to competitors. One can qualify by doing well in a regional series. One can qualify by winning a rally. One can qualify by winning a single specially designated Power Stage at a rally. And two Wild Card teams are nominated for competition in the final event. The end result is that a brilliant driver with the budget to run just two rallies a year could come out, race well, and qualify at his/her first rally, making his/her second rally the championship event.
Everyone who has qualified for the National Rally Championship starts at zero when the final rally event begins. There is no reliance on a bank of built-up points. There's no “I only need to maintain sixth place and finish the rally to win the championship” mentality. Instead, the rally starts as a dog fight, with everyone clamoring for the overall win. That heightens the challenge and the excitement level of the racers to a tangible level only previously imagined in the rallying world.