Born of tragedy, Homestead Speedway has helped a city return
HOMESTEAD, Fla.—America’s highway system, for all practical purposes, ends about a mile from Homestead-Miami Speedway. The tunnel leading into the track bears the designation of “Southernmost Tunnel in the United States, 180 miles from Cuba.” The track sits in the middle of swampland, the runoff of the Everglades.
The roads around the track, such as they are, stretch on perfect compass lines, meeting at right angles. Some are sun-bleached pavement, others are twin tire ruts plunging into the underbrush. Palm tree farms dot the territory around the Air Base and the track, advertising BLOW-OUT SALE in eight-foot-tall weatherbeaten letters.
There is no earthy reason for a track to be here. And yet here it is, now 20 years on, the host of NASCAR’s championship hunt and an arena with one of the more fascinating backstories in American sports.
In mid-August of 1992, a small storm system formed in the Atlantic. Meteorologists didn’t even bother naming it until August 22, and even then, Hurricane Andrew seemed to be one of the dozens of storms that sputter out in a spray of rain.
But then the storm abruptly grew to Category 5 status, giving residents of South Florida less than a day to either batten down their homes or evacuate. Early in the morning of August 24, the eye of the storm bullseyed Homestead and Florida City, the southernmost towns in the continental United States, and the devastation was biblical.
Hurricane Andrew was only the third recorded Cat-5 hurricane to hit the continental U.S., and its winds, estimated at 160 mph, were so powerful it destroyed measuring instruments. The hurricane flattened enormous swathes of Homestead and Florida City. All told, the hurricane killed 44 in Florida and did $25 billion ($42 billion in today’s dollars) in damage to the state, the costliest in American history.
Nearby Homestead Air Force base, located just north of what is now Homestead-Miami Speedway, suffered a near-mortal blow. The base had managed to deploy most of its fighter squadrons to safer locales, but virtually every one of the 2,000 buildings on the base was damaged or destroyed.
“Homestead Air Force Base,” Florida Community Affairs official Toni Riordan said at the time, “no longer exists.”
In the wake of the hurricane, the Department of Defense made a fateful decision: Homestead-Miami Air Base would be reclassified as a reserve base, not an active one. That meant the base would go from 12,000 jobs to about 800, and the Homestead area would lose an estimated 25,000 people as a result.
At the same time, many non-military residents who’d seen their homes and lives flattened took their insurance checks and bailed on the area, moving closer to the Miami area.
“We had a population of 30,000, 27,000,” said Stephen Shelley, vice mayor of Homestead, “I’d say half those people left the city because the devastation was so horrible.”
“To say the area was depressed would be an understatement,” said Al Garcia, now the speedway’s vice president of operations. “It was grim.”
Homestead needed an economic engine, and quickly. The area was bleeding, and with no incentive for income, bankruptcies could finish off what Andrew had begun. The city had access to $75 million in federal economic development funds, but the question would be how to spend it.
Homestead leaders had reason to tread with caution. Over the course of 1992, the Cleveland Indians had built a new, $18 million spring training home in Homestead and were planning to move into it to begin the 1993 season. After the hurricane, the Indians moved north for a temporary home that turned permanent once the team realized it was more efficient to keep the team in central Florida. (Cleveland has since moved to Arizona for spring training.)
The already-built stadium and complex languished for decades. Its still-extant fields serve as a local recreation center, and its buildings now serve as office space for the Homestead Police Department.
So one can forgive Homestead officials for viewing large-scale sports proposals with caution. But local Miami motorsports promoter Ralph Sanchez talked Homestead into building a new track on a stretch of potato farms east of the city. Two-lane roads and irrigation ditches ran past it, but the property was remarkably unremarkable.
Groundbreaking for what would become Homestead-Miami Speedway took place one year to the day after Hurricane Andrew hit. Development required some creative engineering; soil is only about five feet thick in the South Florida region, and then you hit solid rock. Engineers dynamited rock to create fill for the pilings that would hold up the grandstands; the 50-foot-deep lakes in the track’s infield and just outside its walls were created by those blasts.
In contrast to the prison rec yard décor of many tracks, Homestead featured an art deco style from Day One, combining aqua blue, tan, and purple to a sport so long defined by Petty Blue and Earnhardt black. The track opened for racing on Nov. 5, 1995, with Dale Jarrett winning the Jiffy Lube Miami 300 in what was then the Busch, now the Xfinity Series.
Homestead owns the track, and has leased it out—first to Sanchez, now to International Speedway Corporation—under a long-term deal. The track’s initial design resembled the low-bank, sharp-cornered layout of Indianapolis Motor Speedway, but poor racing and dangerous crashes led the track to reconfigure the banks twice, first in 1997 and again in 2003.
Since 1999, the track has hosted NASCAR’s season-ending championship finale, among several other series championships. With a seating capacity of 45,000, Homestead sold out for Sunday’s Sprint Cup championship race, Jeff Gordon’s final turn behind the wheel of a car in NASCAR. The speedway now claims an economic impact of more than $300 million for the surrounding area, as well as 3,100 permanent jobs.
The roads around Homestead-Miami Speedway remain among some of the more desolate in Florida. Discarded appliances still dot the roads, bullet holes pock speed-limit signs, and who-knows-what lies in the swamps deeper in the sawgrass and palms. But the track now looms above it all, its lights visible for miles around.
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Jay Busbee is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at [email protected] or find him on Twitter.
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