Tribune News Service
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.
“Fans have been asking about it for a long time,” said NASCAR Chief Venue & Racing Innovation Officer Ben Kennedy, who also said the drivers have been asking about returning the finale to Homestead.
“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.”
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 race reached projected numbers, Santa Cruz said, but fell “a little shy” of October 2024.
READ MORE: It’s a NASCAR Weekend in Homestead. Yes, they know it’s only March
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 or Alabama.
For the area, that means more fans bringing in money and more media shooting visuals of sunny South Florida that can act as mini-commercials to a national audience starting to go from windbreakers to 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.’”
