The playoff drama ramps up this weekend as the NASCAR Cup Series rolls into Homestead-Miami Speedway, the second race in the final round of eliminations before the championship is decided at Phoenix Raceway next month.
Homestead used to have the honor of hosting the finale, and there has been some pressure on NASCAR to take the title race back there. The HMS oval races well with the Next Gen racecar, though it was also one of the better ovals with previous cars, creating some memorable moments along the way.
One of those began in 2004. NASCAR had introduced the 10-race Chase format for the championship, the first time the sport had used a title format other than a full-season points tally. It was … less than well-received by fans.
2004 gave the detractors plenty of ammunition. Jeff Gordon had a dominant season with Jimmie Johnson dogging him throughout the fall. Kurt Busch, meanwhile, had a good season, but not a great one. As many anti-Chase fans are quick to point out, all things being equal, Busch would have been eliminated from title contention before the green flag even flew at Homestead in ’04 (And its proponents would tell you that’s the point).
All things are not, nor have they ever been, equal on that front, because teams would have approached the season differently, but that’s a whole other can of worms.
Anyway, Busch entered the race with the point lead … and almost threw it away in spectacular fashion. A loose wheel parted ways with the No. 97, and Busch missed plowing into the water barrels at the entrance to pit road by inches.
If he had hit them, it might have changed everything.
But he didn’t and bounced back to finish fifth. Both Johnson and Gordon finished ahead of him, but not by enough. Disaster averted, Busch was the 2004 champion, his only career title.
Oh, and Greg Biffle won the race.
A year later, not much had changed in regards to fans’ acceptance of the Chase, but this time, Tony Stewart held the points lead entering the final race. And all things being equal (see above for why they weren’t), he held it when points were calculated without the Chase as well, by a decent margin in both instances.
As it turned out, Stewart would need some of that padding, because he finished a rather unspectacular 15th, eighth out of the nine Chase drivers in the race (you’ll see what there wasn’t a 10th in a second). Johnson crashed out before halfway.
The real drama though?
Yeah, that was Busch again. Following an altercation with a Maricopa County deputy when he was pulled over for speeding in Arizona prior to the previous week’s race in Phoenix, Busch was unceremoniously fired by Roush Racing (now RFK Racing).
Busch was eighth in driver points prior to his dismissal, out of title contention. Still, his off-track drama injected some extra spice into the end of the season.
A questionable caution for an errant spring rubber that was nowhere near the racing groove drew a caution that cost a young Casey Mears his first Cup win.
Meanwhile, while Stewart was struggling, the margin of victory in the finale was 0.017 seconds.
Biffle won, by the way.
2006 isn’t generally remembered for the finish, though the margin of victory was under half a second. It was the first time in three years that the championship was closer (much closer) when points were calculated under the old system.
All things are not equal … but that four-point margin without the Chase reset gave the system’s detractors plenty to point to. The actual point spread under the Chase system was a much more boring 56 points.
On both tallies, Johnson edged Matt Kenseth for the big trophy. It would be five more years until another driver got his mitts on it.
The race, you say? Oh yeah. Biffle won.
And there you have it. In the midst of the Chase drama (and Busch’s off-track escapades), Biffle quietly laid down a three-race Homestead win streak that has never been equaled.
Or noticed.
The only other driver to win back-to-back at HMS is Stewart (1999 and 2000). Denny Hamlin is the only other driver with three wins at the track, none of them consecutive.
His three victories at Homestead is a career best in the Cup Series at any track. He did not win there in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck or Xfinity series, though he has wins across all three series.
But at the dawn of the Chase era, Biffle played the spoiler. Every. Single. Year.
It’s interesting to note that in the 10-race Chase era, it was rare for the champion to win in the final race at Homestead. Stewart did it in 2011 (and won the title on a tiebreaker by doing so). But in every other year from 2004-13, the winner of the race wasn’t the title winner. In most years, playing it safe was a smarter road to the title.
The playoff era flipped that number around. Ross Chastain won the championship race in 2023 and not the title, but from 2014-22, the champion got there by winning the race. The non-title contenders tend to stay out of the way, afraid of ruining someone’s title hopes under the one-race format.
In any case, unless the champion and the final race winner are one and the same, the race winner takes the back seat. Of a 40-foot stretch limo.
But at Homestead, as NASCAR navigated the new world of a postseason of sorts, Biffle took matters into his own hands and made people pay attention. Busch, Stewart (and Busch) and Johnson may have had memorable seasons, but Biffle’s annual dominance in the finale is something no driver has ever matched.
Amy is an 20-year veteran NASCAR writer and a six-time National Motorsports Press Association (NMPA) writing award winner, including first place awards for both columns and race coverage. As well as serving as Photo Editor, Amy writes The Big 6 (Mondays) after every NASCAR Cup Series race. She can also be found working on her bi-weekly columns Holding A Pretty Wheel (Tuesdays) and Only Yesterday (Wednesdays). A New Hampshire native whose heart is in North Carolina, Amy’s work credits have extended everywhere from driver Kenny Wallace’s website to Athlon Sports. She can also be heard weekly as a panelist on the Hard Left Turn podcast that can be found on AccessWDUN.com's Around the Track page.