Draft:Sioux Chief Showdown

The Sioux Chief Showdown (also sometimes known as the ARCA Menards Series Showdown) was a series of ten races inside of the 20-race ARCA Menards Series schedule where drivers in these races competed for an additional, separate championship awarded after the last of those ten races. The Showdown was implemented in 2020 after the unification of the ARCA Menards Series with NASCAR's K&N Pro Series East and West, which were renamed the ARCA Menards Series East and West.

Sam Mayer won the inaugural Showdown championship in 2020. Ty Gibbs won the Sioux Chief Showdown championship in 2021 and also went on to win the entire series championship that year. Sammy Smith, who won the East Series championship in 2022, entered all of the Showdown races in the main ARCA Series in 2022 and went on to win the Showdown that year. The Showdown was ended after the 2022 season.

Decline of teams and competition in ARCA
After NASCAR bought ARCA in spring 2018, the plan was to change the format of the three developmental series in time for the 2020 season. This was largely due to the fact that not only were the two racing organizations one as a result of the acquisition, but also because all three series were seeing smaller field sizes each season due to teams and drivers having a lack of sponsorship and the changes in the cars in each series to a different, newer body design resembling NASCAR's Gen-6 racecar. Previous ARCA cars were hand me down Gen-4 racecars from teams in the NASCAR Cup Series, which were used in that series until the 2007 season. ARCA car counts were in the 50's for various races in the 2000's decade, and even as high as in the 60's at the season-opening Daytona race (in 2006, 2007, and 2008, there were 68, 66, and 65 cars, respectfully that showed up to qualify). However, just over a decade later in 2019, they did not even have a full 40-car field for this same race, only filling 35 of 40 possible positions.

Drivers who finished top-10 in the standings
The shrinking entry lists in the 2010's also trickled down to the quality of the race field in ARCA as well. Previously in ARCA, the top 10 in the championship standings were all seen as "competitive teams" with top-knotch equipment capable of winning races and being in the running for the championship. However, in just a few years, this was not the case at all. With the closure of many teams due to the loss of sponsors and the change in the car body, teams that were mid-pack and underdog teams, only sporadically competitive at-best, were now finishing in the top-10 in the standings. This included series veteran Brad Smith from 2016 through 2019, who failed to record a single top-10 race finish in that entire span, yet still finished somewhere in the bottom half of the top-10 in points in each of those four years. Wayne Peterson Racing, a longtime ARCA backmarker team which has received criticism for their aging cars failing to meet minimum speed in races often times, finished eleventh in points with Con Nicolopolous for two straight years, and then got a top-10 points finish the following season with rookie Tim Richmond (although Richmond's 2019 season was the best season competitive-wise for a Peterson car regardless). Also, Dick Doheny, a start and park driver for Fast Track Racing, finished ninth in the points standings in 2019. After starting and parking his No. 1 car, Doheny would hop atop the pit box as the crew chief for Fast Track's No. 11 car each week, yet he still finished that high in the standings due to the lack of competitive teams in the series that year.

Success of young, part-time drivers
Corey Heim, a 16 year-old driver for Chad Bryant Racing, who was ineligible to compete on the larger tracks such as Daytona and Talladega, was able to finish tenth in the 2019 points standings. Right behind him in 11th through 13th were part-timers Chandler Smith, Carson Hocevar, Ty Gibbs, and Sam Mayer, who were also in the same boat. All five of these drivers competed in all of the short track races on the schedule, and they all had success, finishing in the top-5 or 10 in nearly every one of those races, which brought them up to finish tenth through thirteenth in the standings, just barely behind Doheny, who ran almost full-time in 2019. Smith was the most successful of them, winning five races in 2019 while running only part-time, while series champion Christian Eckes and runner-up Michael Self each won four races while running full-time. The success of those drivers arguably is what led the sanctioning body to make the Showdown be on the level of a championship. All of those 15, 16, and 17-year old drivers would not be eligible to compete in all 20 ARCA races due to the larger tracks such as Daytona and Talladega having the age limit of 18 to be able to race there. By picking select races out of the schedule to count for an extra championship, this allowed those drivers to actually compete for their own title. It should be noted that the Showdown races still will count in the standings for the large 20-race series of ARCA races.

Success of K&N East and West Series Combination Races
The K&N East and West Series previously held a combination race (and sometimes even two) each year at the Iowa Speedway in the middle of the country, so it was feasible for teams on both coasts to come to the track and race. Fans got to see drivers from both series come together and see who performed best with competitors from the other series and with a larger field size as well. For this very reason, the Iowa race was one of the highlights on both the East and West Series schedule.

NASCAR included elements from the days of the combination race with this 10-race special series, by announcing that drivers from each of the three series (the big ARCA Series, the East Series, and the West Series) would participate if they chose to. Longtime East and West Series teams such as Bill McAnally Racing, Rev Racing, and McGowan Motorsports Inc, just to name a few, entered cars in the big ARCA Series for the first time in their history.

On December 14, 2019, it was announced that Sioux Chief Manufacturing, previously the sponsor for the ARCA Series' Short Track Challenge, would be the sponsor of the Showdown.

Races and tracks
In its first season in 2020, the Sioux Chief Showdown tracks were as follows: