NASCAR brings its championship back to Homestead. And, that’s not all
NASCAR Championship Weekend, which became a tradition at Homestead-Miami Speedway in November from 2002 to 2019, will return in 2026, NASCAR officially announced Tuesday morning.
NASCAR’s Cup, Xfinity and Camping World Truck series titles will be decided Nov. 6-8 of 2026 as Homestead joins a rotation of venues for the season climax that will include Phoenix, the current championship home.
The rest of the tracks won’t be announced all at once to give each its day in the sun, NASCAR Chief Venue & Racing Innovation Officer Ben Kennedy said. But, expect more 1.5-mile ovals like Homestead and short tracks and not so much super speedways (Daytona, Talledega) or road courses.
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“Fans have been asking about it for a long time,” said Kennedy, who said Homestead also was a popular choice among drivers and teams for the racing and size of the South Florida market.
Kennedy said fan surveys ranked Homestead as the No. 1 place for the championship to be decided. Also, he said, NASCAR has “several pages” of upgrades they want to make in the facility, too many to be done by 2026.
“Homestead is a special place,” Homestead-Miami Speedway President Guillermo Santa Cruz said. “It’s a special track and it’s a special location for fans.”
NASCAR drivers tend to love Homestead for all the idiosyncrasies that put more control in the driver’s hands.
“Can we move around the race track? Can we do different things? Tires falling off...Is that fun? To us? Yeah, that’s fun!” said Penske Racing’s Joey Logano, who won the first of his three titles at Homestead in 2018. “It’s tough, challenging. There are a couple of bumps there. You’re running up next to the wall. You can also run a little bit off the wall. You can do stuff. That is something that is special.”
And, the cherry on top for Miami-Dade County: even when Homestead’s not hosting championship weekend, it’s race weekend likely will remain late in the NASCAR playoffs.
Kennedy said while NASCAR doesn’t know how many or which tracks will be in the championship weekend rotation, the goal is to keep the dates for those tracks late in the season.
For fans who head for Homestead, that means races that matter in the most visible way for the season championships as compared to races in March, when NASCAR came this year. Attendance at this year’s March race weekend reached projected numbers, Santa Cruz said, but fell “a little shy” of October 2024.
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As national as NASCAR has become during the last 40 years, it’s bedrock support remains the southeast region where it evolved from moonshine running. Florida’s a long state, but Homestead’s still a shorter drive than Phoenix if you’re revving up the car, truck or RV in the Carolinas, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama or, really, anywhere east of Houston.
For the South Florida area, that means more fans bringing in money and more media shooting visuals of sunny South Florida that act as mini-commercials to parts of the country swapping windbreakers for coats.
This part was important enough that the county commission backed a proposal by commission Vice Chair Kionne McGhee, who represents the area that includes Homestead, to talk about providing services and available tourism tax money for NASCAR if it brought the 2026 Championship Weekend back to Homestead.
(Asked about subsidies from Miami-Dade County, Kennedy said it was nothing NASCAR wanted to speak about at the moment.)
“It’s the end of the [NASCAR] season and we know fans stick around to go to the keys or around South Florida,” Santa Cruz said. “They’re not in a hurry to go back to where they’re from. I know, for sure, some drivers have said, ‘We like to finish at Homestead then go fishing.’”
This story was originally published May 6, 2025 at 10:10 AM.
