Homestead-Miami Speedway was the site of the Cup Series championship race from 2002-2019 and has been a playoff race for the past three seasons. However, even though the race has moved to March this year, the shadow of the title is never far from view in South Florida.
For one thing, it’s a driver’s track. Homestead offers multiple effective grooves, including the famous high line that sees drivers ride around mere inches from the wall — a test of courage and skill that rewards the best and brightest, as typified by Tyler Reddick’s daring outside pass to beat Ryan Blaney in last year’s Round of 8. Scan the list of winners over the years, and it’s mostly filled with stars, from Tony Stewart, Jeff Gordon, Denny Hamlin and Kyle Busch to Carl Edwards and the underrated Greg Biffle.
None of that is a coincidence.
More recently, Homestead has seen a stretch of wins from a group almost exclusively consisting of heavy hitters in the 2025 Cup championship picture: Joey Logano, Busch, Hamlin, William Byron, Kyle Larson, Christopher Bell and Reddick. All rank either among the Top 10 in my rolling driver rankings or the betting futures for the 2025 Cup title, where there is an implied 58% probability that this season’s eventual champion comes from that group.
Why is Homestead such an important bellwether for the season at large? One factor is that tire wear is such a recurring consideration at a number of tracks — and few track surfaces eat up rubber like we see at Miami. With Atlanta getting repaved and reconfigured in 2021 and Auto Club Speedway in Fontana being retired from the schedule after 2023, Homestead and Darlington are the two highest-tire-wear intermediates in the Cup Series today, which means a driver’s ability to save tires is as much a key to victory as mastering the art of ripping the fence.
There’s a reason why Hamlin has won three times in his Homestead career — he might be the premier tire-saver in the sport — or why Martin Truex Jr. had the third-highest career Driver Rating (105.1) at the track, trailing only Larson (110.6) and Edwards (109.5). And tire management is a skill that carries over to plenty of other important places, from Darlington to Richmond, Bristol, Dover and increasingly, Kansas.
The fact Homestead has many elements that test drivers across a broad spectrum of skills made it a popular choice for the season-ending championship race. But even after Phoenix replaced Homestead in that regard in 2020, what happens at Homestead this weekend will be a strong predictor of what we are likely to see later in the season, especially in the playoffs.
To illustrate this, here are the five most comparable tracks to Homestead-Miami according to two different measures — iFantasyRace’s similar track guide, and a calculation of other tracks that have had the highest correlation to Homestead in terms of the same drivers doing well or poorly (per Driver Rating) since the Next Gen era began in 2022:
We can see Kansas (Round of 12) and Las Vegas (Round of 8) show up on both lists as mile-and-a-half tracks with similar characteristics. Darlington (Round of 16) also shows up in the more qualitative ranking, because it is another high-tire-wear intermediate. And Phoenix (Championship 4) has a lot of overlap with Homestead in terms of which drivers tend to excel — or not — at both places.
In other words, you can take the championship out of Homestead, but you can’t take Homestead out of the championship. With tire management and the ability to run multiple lines being at a premium, strong performances at Homestead often correlates with success at other high-stakes races throughout the season. And given the recent streak of winners who are guaranteed to factor heavily into the 2025 title conversation, this weekend’s race could provide one of the clearest signals yet about who will emerge as the true championship favorite.