Toyota’s Truck Title Was Settled by a Cut Tire on Lap 2

Kaden Honeycutt won the 2026 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series championship on Friday night at Homestead-Miami Speedway, driving the No. 11 TRICON Garage Toyota Tundra to the race win and Toyota’s 11th drivers’ title in the series.

The finale had been billed as a straight fight between Honeycutt and Layne Riggs, the only two drivers still eligible for the title, but the fight never happened. Riggs’s Ford made side-to-side contact with the pole-winning Chevrolet of Nick Sanchez on the second lap, the contact cut his right rear tire, and he was on pit road by Lap 17. A second shredded right rear on Lap 46 and a pass-through penalty for too many crew members over the wall left him seven laps down, and he finished 32nd. Honeycutt took the lead on a restart on Lap 120 of 134 and crossed the line 1.038 seconds ahead of Christian Eckes.

According to the NASCAR Wire Service recap, Honeycutt had spent the first half of the race protecting his position before a caution with 27 laps left put the call in his hands. "I say we pit, put ’em on and go for it," he radioed to crew chief Scott Zipadelli, and the fresh tires carried him past Eckes for his fifth win of the season and the fifth of his career. "I’ve worked so damn hard to be here," he said afterward. "We just won Homestead and the damn championship." Riggs ended the year second in the standings, 83 points behind.

Toyota’s championship release puts the season at five wins, 16 top fives and 19 top 10s in 25 races, with the top-five and top-10 counts the best in the series. The wins came at Watkins Glen, Richmond, Kansas, Phoenix and Homestead, and Speedway Digest added that three of them came in the seven playoff races, with three poles along the way. Honeycutt, who is 23 and from Texas, signed a Toyota development deal in August 2025, finished third in last year’s standings with Halmar Friesen Racing and moved into the TRICON seat for 2026.

That seat is the one Corey Heim used to win the 2025 title with a single-season record of 12 wins, which makes this TRICON Garage’s second championship in a row and Zipadelli’s second straight as crew chief. Toyota says Zipadelli is the first crew chief in Truck Series history to win titles with three different drivers, after Brett Moffitt in 2018 and Heim last year. Heim, who ran only nine of the 25 Truck Series races this year, won the first two stages on Friday in the No. 1 TRICON Toyota and finished sixth, and he leaves the series with three wins from those nine starts.

Honeycutt is the ninth Tundra driver to win the series, following Heim, Ben Rhodes, Moffitt, Christopher Bell, Erik Jones, Matt Crafton, Todd Bodine and Johnny Benson. Toyota counts 257 Truck Series wins since it entered in 2004, and Friday’s was its 699th NASCAR win overall. Paul Doleshal, Toyota Motor North America’s general manager of motorsports and sponsorships, called Honeycutt "the epitome of hard work and dedication to your craft paying off in the biggest way," and said the company expected the same in 2027, when he will defend the title in the same No. 11 Safelite Tundra.

Honeycutt’s Phoenix win on October 16 had already shown the pattern, as Toyota’s recap of that weekend noted that he led the final 53 laps there, and he arrived at Homestead with a 20-point edge over Riggs. The Truck Series opens its 2027 season on February 19 at Daytona under a new title sponsor, as the NASCAR FedEx Freight Truck Series. Toyota’s Cup Series drivers Christopher Bell and Denny Hamlin still have their own title shot at Homestead on Sunday.

The Toyota Report Take

A championship decided by a cut tire on Lap 2 is not the finale anyone wanted, and Riggs, who won seven races this year to Honeycutt’s five, will spend the winter thinking about a run-in with a truck that had nothing to do with the title fight. But the points were earned over 25 races, not one, and the best top-five and top-10 record in the series is the kind of consistency that wins titles under any format.

For Toyota, the more telling number is the one on the door. The No. 11 TRICON truck has now won back-to-back championships with two different drivers, one a record-setter who has moved up and one a 23-year-old in his first season with the team. That says the truck and the crew chief are the constants, and it means the Tundra will start 2027 as the favorite again no matter who is driving it.

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