NASCAR drivers support switching up tracks for championship weekend

Since 2020 and at least until 2024, Phoenix Raceway has hosted the NASCAR Championship, and drivers want some change. It appears it isn’t just a group of fans that would like to see the season finale move around from year to year.

In the current playoff format, since 2014, Homestead-Miami and Phoenix have been the destinations to determine NASCAR’s champions. Given the early November date, weather plays a major factor in making this decision.

Miami and Phoenix are pretty good cities as far as weather is concerned. Still, is there more NASCAR can do?

AutoWeek spoke with a few Cup Series drivers including Kyle Larson and Joey Logano. The two championship drivers weighed in on how they feel the last race of the year should be handled.

“I definitely think it should move around, but there are not a lot of places where you can schedule a race in early November [because of weather] and know that you’re going to have a race as scheduled on Sunday at 3 p.m. Eastern,” said Larson. “Homestead and Phoenix are good. Texas sucks, so you don’t want to go there. You hate to decide a champion at Daytona. So it’s probably between Phoenix and Homestead.”

Sorry, Texas, the NASCAR Championship can’t be there until we figure out what the heck is wrong with that track. Larson is right.

Joey Logano on the NASCAR Championship venue

For the upcoming season, changes were made to the schedule, regular season and playoffs. The start of the year gets Daytona and Atlanta back-to-back. In the playoffs, Darlington is now the season finale and Atlanta-2 will start the Round of 16, adding another superspeedway to the postseason to go with Talladega. How about that?

Watkins Glen is also an addition to the Round of 16 with Bristol remaining the closing race.

Joey Logano knows one thing for sure, you can’t have Daytona as the championship.

“Definitely not Daytona,” Logano said. “I don’t think a superspeedway should ever end the season. I’m really skeptical even of having a superspeedway in the playoffs.

“But I do think the final race should move around. I think it’s like the Super Bowl. It doesn’t stay in the same city every year. It gets bidded out. Why can’t we do that?

“Being able to have a championship race at your track is great – look at Phoenix. They didn’t sell it out in years before. With all the changes they made, it’s a great venue now.”

For at least one more season, Phoenix will be the NASCAR Championship race. It would be great to see it in Kansas on that 1.5-mile track or another intermediate with how well these Next Gen cars perform.

In the end, South Beach might just be the answer. Now, excuse me, I have to go listen to Keith Whitley after talking about Miami so much.