NASCAR Championship Weekend to transition to rotation model beginning in 2026

Homestead-Miami Speedway will return as host of NASCAR’s Championship Weekend next year, but that news comes with a dash of variety. Going forward, the title-race tripleheader will rotate among a handful of tracks, showcasing the big-event feel at new venues and markets.

Think Super Bowl, NBA or MLB All-Star Weekends, or college basketball’s Final Four.

While the parallels to other major league sports are strong, those events are held on courts or playing fields that are relatively uniform. The rotation model for NASCAR’s season finales on a variety of tracks and track types has the potential to transform the competition.

“If you’ve watched a lot of other sports properties that are moving the location around year after year, part of that is to build up pent-up demand,” said Ben Kennedy, NASCAR Executive Vice President and Chief Venue & Racing Innovation Officer. “But part of it is that variability in a lot of the markets, and then a little bit of it is what we talked about as well is just having a little bit of differentiation as it relates to the competition and racing product as well. Having the playoffs be more unpredictable every year, the championship venue to be at a different location, I think gives you the ability to see different teams and drivers kind of rise to the occasion to be able to be crowned a champion.”

In the last 23 years, only two tracks have played host to NASCAR’s season-ending events — Homestead-Miami since 2002, and then Phoenix Raceway from 2020 to the current season. The rotation structure for future events is subject to discussion by the NASCAR Playoff Committee, an assembly of industry figures tasked with shaping the postseason’s format, which has been largely unchanged since 2014.

Determining which speedways are suitable championship venues comes down to multiple factors, Kennedy said, noting 1.5-mile Homestead-Miami and 1-mile Phoenix have both been capable hosts in past seasons and will remain in the rotation. Specific tracks beyond those two will be announced later, but those under consideration come from a mixture of ownership groups — NASCAR, Speedway Motorsports and independents.

“I would say it’s four or five things,” Kennedy said. “It’s marketing and promotion, for sure, and it’s location. We want to be in a warm-weather market. Ideally, being in November, that first week of November, it kind of limits you to the amount of races that you can run. … I would say the quality of the facility. In Phoenix, we put over $100 million into the redevelopment of that track, and it was a big catalyst for bringing this championship to the West Coast. We’re going to be putting a good amount of capital into Homestead as well ahead of the race.

“The racing product, I think, is another big part of this. And then overall, it’s just the entire industry’s feedback on this. So we collaborate with our broadcast partners, our teams. We hear from our drivers what they think, a lot of our corporate partners, and then ultimately the fans, and the fans have a large voice in this, and we get their perspective on it every single year.”

Kennedy singled out Homestead-Miami as No. 1 on the fans’ list for next year’s schedule, saying the track checks all the criteria for a championship location. Facility upgrades are scheduled between now and November 2026, providing a runway for improvements to the 1.5-mile oval’s amenities, infrastructure and promotional plans.

Hosting the championship weekend is a responsibility track president Guillermo Santa Cruz, appointed to Homestead’s post last July, said he’s eager to tackle. But he also said he’s hoping to set a benchmark for how it’s done, establishing a high bar for other tracks to emulate in future finales.

“First, it’s an honor to be chosen as the first one to be in that rotation,” Santa Cruz said. “I think that rotation is a really good model for us to move into. It’s good for the fans, it’s good for the drivers, and it’s great for everybody, and it’ll allow us to really set a lot of precedent and then work with NASCAR more broadly to see how the model is going to be executed. You know, what is it that’s going to move from one track to another? What are the things that can only be done in Miami, because Miami is a certain sort of market, and those things will remain here, but what are the things that the sort of traveling circus will take with it when it goes someplace else? So to be able to impact that from the get-go and be in those conversations from the very beginning and be the ones engaging in that respect, it’s wonderful because we’re starting out with a blank sheet of paper.

“The NASCAR team is wonderful, but there’s nothing like having that ability to be the first one up and to have that blank sheet of paper in front of you and say, ‘OK, what are we going to do?’ Then you start. As a creative person, I love that. I love that ability to do that. That’s my favorite thing in the world.”

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