2022 ARCA Menards Series West
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The 2022 ARCA Menards Series West was the 69th season of the ARCA Menards Series West, a regional stock car racing series sanctioned by NASCAR in the United States. The season began on March 11 at Phoenix Raceway with the General Tire 150 and ended with the Desert Diamond Casino West Valley 100, also at Phoenix Raceway, on November 4.
Jesse Love, who won the championship for the last 2 years, did not go for a three-peat. Love revealed in an interview in October 2021 with Frontstretch that he would not return to the West Series full-time in 2022[1] and he ran the majority of the main ARCA Series season for Venturini Motorsports. He had driven for the team part-time in that series in 2020 and 2021.[2]
This season also saw a historic milestone, as the race at Evergreen Speedway on August 20 marked the 1,000th West Series race.[3]
Complete schedule
Schedule
Phoenix Raceway and Sonoma Raceway announced their 2022 race dates in tweets on September 29.[37] The rest of the schedule was announced on November 19.[3] The date of the season-finale at Phoenix would later be moved from Saturday, November 5 to Friday, November 4.[38]
Note: The race at Phoenix in March was a combination race with the ARCA Menards Series (highlighted in gold).
Schedule changes
The 2022 schedule features 11 races, which is the same number of races that there were on the 2020 schedule. The 2021 schedule only had 9 races.
- Irwindale Speedway's August date moves to March. (The track's other race remains on the 4th of July weekend.)
- After being taken off the schedule in 2021, Kern County Raceway Park and Evergreen Speedway were both added back onto the 2022 schedule. Their races will be in April and August, respectively.
- Portland International Raceway was given a second race to be held on the first weekend of June, which is the same weekend as the track's new Xfinity Series race. As a result, the race at Sonoma Raceway was pushed back a week to the second weekend of June. The race at Sonoma will also go back to using the chute instead of the carousel, which was used in 2019 and 2021.[39]
- Colorado National Speedway was taken off the schedule. This will be the first season since 2006 that the West Series will not have had a race at the track.
- The race at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway Bullring moves from September to October along with the weekend's Cup Series race at the big LVMS track.
Broadcasting
The TV lineup is similar to what it looked like in 2021, with NBC airing all of the non-combination races on tape delay and MAVTV airing the combination race at Phoenix (which is also the season-opener). However, USA Network will be the channel that the NBC races are aired on instead of NBCSN, which was shut down at the end of 2021.[40]
NBC Sports TrackPass, which previously had the streaming rights to all of races, lost the rights to FloRacing.[41]