Honeycutt Wins the Finale and the Crown: First Truck Title Sealed at Homestead

The championship was supposed to go down to the final laps. In the end, it was effectively over before the race had really begun. Kaden Honeycutt won the 2026 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series title on Friday night at Homestead-Miami Speedway, winning the season finale and outlasting Layne Riggs over a seven-race Chase that had promised a fight to the finish. He is the 23rd champion in series history, and he did it in only his second full-time season, driving the No. 11 TRICON Garage Toyota — the same team that carried Corey Heim to the title last year. Honeycutt arrived in Florida with a 20-point lead, the kind of margin that sounds comfortable until you remember what a single bad night can do in this sport. Riggs, the most dominant driver of the regular season with six wins in the first 18 races, needed a clean night and a stumble from the leader. He got neither. Trouble found Riggs almost immediately. Contact with Nick Sanchez on lap two was the first warning, and on lap ten his right-rear tyre let go, sending him to pit road and laps down before the race had settled. A second blown right-rear later in the evening ended any faint hope of a recovery. He finished 32nd, six laps down, and watched the championship he had chased all year disappear in the opening stages. That left Honeycutt free to race for the win rather than manage a points gap, and he did exactly that. He took the lead from Christian Eckes on the final restart with 13 laps to go and held on to win by 1.038 seconds, his fifth victory of the season. Corey Heim, the defending champion, won both stages but could not match Honeycutt when it mattered. The final points told the story plainly enough: Honeycutt 2,471, Riggs 2,388. It is a remarkable rise for a driver who, less than five years ago, was hardly known outside the regional ranks. A year ago Honeycutt finished third in this championship, two spots behind Heim. His 2025 season then fell apart in strange fashion: he had planned a full campaign with Niece Motorsports, climbed as high as fifth in points by mid-summer, and was released before Watkins Glen after signing with another team for 2026. Young's Motorsports picked him up for a one-off at the Glen to keep him eligible for the postseason, and he spent the playoffs in Halmar-Friesen Racing's No. 52 Toyota, filling in for Stewart Friesen after his serious dirt-track crash in Canada. He finished no worse than 18th in those eight races and ended the year as a genuine threat to Heim's title hopes. This year he made good on all of it. His first national-series win came in May at Watkins Glen, hours after his first career ARCA Menards Series victory at the same road course. His second truck win, at Richmond in August, was a statement — 225 of 250 laps led. He started the Chase with an eighth-place finish, then reeled off top fives in the next four races, including wins at Kansas and Phoenix. There were wobbles: a brush with the wall at Charlotte while battling Riggs, and late contact from Tristan McKee at Martinsville that shuffled him from the top five to 14th and trimmed his lead to those 20 points. None of it mattered in the end. On Friday night at Homestead, the driver who had spent a year fighting for a seat in the sport drove the No. 11 to a championship. The sky, as NASCAR itself put it, is the limit.