Homestead Has Great Racing But Far Too Tight a Focus

Homestead-Miami Speedway always seems to deliver for NASCAR. For 17 years, the South Florida oval hosted the season finale for the NASCAR Cup Series and likely wants it back. I attended five of those races and generally came away satisfied. If Sunday’s (Oct. 27) Straight Talk Wireless 400 was the final race of the season, NASCAR would have been overjoyed.

But it’s not.

Naturally, the biggest moment in Sunday’s race was right at the end. Denny Hamlin was looking good for victory before Ryan Blaney drove around him coming to the white flag. It seemed like it was over, but Tyler Reddick, on slightly older tires than everyone else, swept past on the outside on the final lap to win.

This is another one of those situations where I’m happy that we have Leigh Diffey in the broadcast booth. He realized the gravitas of what we were seeing here. It’s not often that we get a race like that in the Cup Series. This was a combination of a great move from Reddick and a bit of a blunder from Blaney.

In all seriousness, I was surprised that he was able to keep up given the tire wear that Homestead is known for these days. Had Kyle Larson not spun himself out with 14 laps to go while racing Blaney for the lead, this race would’ve had a completely different outcome. Either Blaney or Larson would have won and Reddick would have been around 14th. Still would have been enjoyable, though.

Sunday’s race will likely go down as one of the strongest playoff races ever for playoff contenders. Other than Joey Logano, who struggled with handling issues and a case of senioritis for much of the race, the playoff drivers were up front all day.

That led NBC Sports to focus almost all its coverage at the front of the race. As you can imagine, I’m not a fan of that. Such a plan for coverage means that you’re probably going to miss things.

There were only a couple of times during the broadcast that NBC Sports broke away from this general focus, including the couple of times that Justin Haley got spun out and when Larson had to charge up from the back following his early wall contact.

As a result, we only saw a small piece of what was going on. According to NASCAR’s Loop Data, passing under…