Throttle-Back Thursday: 2002 was the first of the big NASCAR finales at Homestead-Miami

The big news out of NASCAR this week was substantial changes to the Cup Series schedule starting 2020 — including moving the series finale from Homestead-Miami Speedway to ISM Raceway Phoenix. We’re told to expect even more changes after 2020, when the terms of sanctioning agreements NASCAR has with certain tracks expire. You can read more about the rationale behind the changes here.

Though Homestead is hardly an old-school track — it opened in 1995 — it has been the last race on the schedule for long enough to have become a tradition for fans. NASCAR’s recent shake-up is a perfect time to look back at the very first time it played host to the Winston Cup finale, on November 17, 2002. We covered it in the Nov. 25 issue of Autoweek that year.

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