Honeycutt Wins Truck Title as Riggs' Two Flat Tires End His Championship Bid

Kaden Honeycutt is the 2026 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series champion, winning Friday night’s season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway and the title in the same race. The championship fight ended before halfway, when title rival Layne Riggs cut two right-rear tires and fell six laps down. Honeycutt won anyway, taking the lead on a lap-121 restart and beating Christian Eckes by 1.038 seconds.

How did Riggs lose the title before halfway?

On lap 2, in a move that decided the championship. Riggs was side-drafting pole-sitter Nick Sanchez coming off Turn 2 when Sanchez’s No. 77 Chevrolet cut the right-rear tire on Riggs’s No. 34 Ford, USA Today reports. Riggs pitted on lap 17 and returned two laps down, then suffered a second right-rear failure around lap 44 after grazing the wall, and a pass-through penalty for too many crew members over the wall on that stop left him seven laps down. He finished 32nd, six laps down, 83 points behind Honeycutt. “I got super free up under him. Next thing I knew, we got a tire down,” Riggs said, RACER reports. “Obviously, we weren’t able to put the consistency together to be champions tonight.” The cruelty of it is the season behind it: Riggs won a series-high seven races, six of them before the Chase to earn the No. 1 seed, and still needed a near-perfect night because the Chase had already cost him twice, with a loose wheel at Bristol leaving him 32nd and a wall scrape at Kansas leaving him 19th, NASCAR.com reports.

Why did Honeycutt race for the win instead of cruising?

Because once the title was safe, he wanted the race too. Honeycutt spent the first half trying not to push too hard, and with Riggs laps down he could have ridden around to the title. Instead, under caution with 27 laps left, he told crew chief Scott Zipadelli to pit for his last set of fresh tires, RACER reports. “I say we pit, put ‘em on and go for it,” he radioed. He took the lead after the restart on lap 121 of 134 and pulled away from Eckes, then asked his crew for radio silence so he could focus on the final laps, USA Today reports. It was his fifth win of the season, after Watkins Glen, Richmond, Kansas and Phoenix, and the fifth of his career. “Man, this is amazing. I’ve worked so damn hard to be here,” he said on the frontstretch. “We just won Homestead and the damn championship.”

Who is Kaden Honeycutt, and how did he get the No. 11?

A 23-year-old from Willow Park, Texas, who was hardly known five years ago and took the long way to a championship truck. He came up through late-model short-track racing, won 16 CARS Tour races and the Pro Late Model championship in 2024, and raced three part-time Truck seasons before 2025, when he started the year with Niece Motorsports, was released before Watkins Glen, picked up a one-off with Young’s Motorsports at The Glen, and finished the season in Halmar-Friesen Racing’s No. 52, NASCAR.com reports. In those eight races he finished no worse than 18th and ran three straight top 10s. His first win came at Watkins Glen in May, hours after his first career ARCA win at the same road course, and his second came dominantly at Richmond in August, leading 225 of 250 laps. Zipadelli said the Watkins Glen win lifted a weight off Honeycutt’s shoulders, because he felt he had to perform at the level Corey Heim had set in the No. 11 the year before. The truck he joined is the one Heim drove to a single-season-record 12 victories and the 2025 title, and Honeycutt finished third in that 2025 championship, two spots behind Heim. His own summary of the season was blunt: “I definitely had the expectation to be a champion. It wasn’t because the vehicles weren’t going to be fast enough. It was because I didn’t do my job, right?”

What does the No. 11’s second straight title mean?

It makes the truck the story as much as the driver. The championship is the second straight for the TRICON No. 11 and the 11th drivers’ championship for Toyota in the series, RACER reports. For Zipadelli it is a third title, and he becomes the first crew chief in Truck Series history to win championships with three different drivers, USA Today reports. He missed the first three races of the season after serious injuries in an off-season accident, NASCAR.com reports, which makes the run a recovery story on the pit box as well as in the car. Heim, meanwhile, swept the first two stages on Friday, breaking Kyle Busch’s record for stage sweeps with 14, and finished sixth in his ninth Truck start of the season. He won three Truck races and two Cup races this year, the Brickyard 400 and at Naval Base Coronado, and moves to full-time Cup racing with 23XI Racing in 2027.

What did the two drivers say afterward?

Honeycutt talked about the people who got him there, and Riggs talked about the truck he never got to know. “Thank you to every owner, thank you everybody that’s let me drive the race car for them, whether it was dirt, asphalt, road course, doesn’t matter,” Honeycutt said. “That is because of you guys I’m sitting right here with this group behind me as champions.” He dedicated the title to the dirt-track racers back home in Texas, saying he worked with his father in the shop for years just to stay in the dirt-track business. Riggs, who will return to Front Row Motorsports in the No. 34 next season, was prouder of the season than bitter about the night: “I’m just proud of the entire team that we were even in the mix, we even had a chance to become champion. It was disappointing to know I didn’t even know what my truck was going to be.”

What happens next?

Honeycutt defends the title in 2027 after TRICON extended his contract last month, USA Today reports, and the No. 11 stays the truck to beat. The weekend is not over at Homestead: the Cup Series crowns its champion there on Sunday, the same track where Kaulig named Allmendinger and Dillon to lead Dodge’s 2027 return earlier on Friday, and where Spire’s suspension kept Carson Hocevar out of the finale. The driver market keeps moving around the title too, from the Haas and Sam Hunt swap that moved Sheldon Creed to Christopher Bell’s public row with Kyle Larson over a power-steering claim. But the Truck Series has its champion, and the margin tells the story of the season: seven wins for Riggs, five for Honeycutt, and a title decided by two tires on lap 2. For the shape of the three NASCAR national series, the Truck title is the first of the weekend’s three to be settled.