NASCAR estimates up to 15% energy savings from Homestead's new ABB building system
ABB installed a building management system at Homestead-Miami Speedway before the 2026 Championship Weekend. It starts with HVAC in three hospitality and media areas and should cover about 80% of the speedway once five support buildings join by early 2027. The up-to-15% savings figure is still an estimate.
This story was produced through MarketScale. See how Building Management teams put it to work with Customer Stories & Case Studies.
Key takeaways
The controls adjust HVAC using occupancy, outdoor weather and occupant comfort. Before buying a similar system, a venue should ask where its own occupancy data will come from.
Free workspace
Turn your Building Management expertise into content.
Record interviews, organize footage, and write with AI on a free trial of the MarketScale platform for qualifying companies. No demo required, no credit card.
NASCAR switched on a new building management system at Homestead-Miami Speedway right before the busiest weekend of its year. The ABB system went live ahead of the 2026 Championship Weekend, Nov. 6-8. It pulls HVAC and equipment data from the track's suites, club and media spaces into one dashboard that operators can check on-site or remotely, EnergyTech reported on Nov. 10.
The timing gave it a very public first test. Homestead hosted NASCAR's season finale every year from 2002 through 2019, and this year it got the title race back, Kaulig Racing noted in its race preview. NASCAR's schedule put the Cup Series Championship on Sunday, Nov. 8. If a suite runs warm, the facilities team hears about it on the one weekend everyone is watching.
NASCAR estimates the system could support annual energy savings of up to 15%. For anyone running a stadium, campus or multi-building site, though, the order of the rollout is the more useful part.
Suites and club first, support buildings next
Three areas are connected so far: the Grandstand Tower and Suites, the Champions Club, and the Turn 1 Suites and Media Center. Five support buildings are due by early 2027. With those added, the system should cover about 140,000 square feet, which EnergyTech puts at about 80% of the speedway.
Taken together, those two figures put the speedway's total building space at roughly 175,000 square feet. That's our arithmetic, not a published number. It's a modest footprint for a 1.5-mile oval. Most of the energy that buildings use at a racetrack sits in a fairly small set of enclosed spaces, and the first phase goes after the ones guests pay the most to sit in.
What the first phase covers, and what comes next
Homestead-Miami Speedway; EnergyTech
The speedway's fan guide sells the Champions Club as the best seat in the house and promises that guests in the suites and club can "relax in complete comfort." Corporate guests book the suites to entertain clients. The track markets its corporate hospitality packages in the Skybox Suites, the Turn 1 Suites and the Pit Road Cabanas, and the Turn 1 Suites are already on the dashboard. Club and Turn 1 Suites guests even get their own preferred parking, the Yellow Lot.
Once comfort is written into the sales copy, a warm room stops being just a facilities ticket. It becomes a broken promise to a paying client. Our reading is that putting these rooms first lets the system learn in the spaces where a comfort problem costs the most goodwill. Those rooms are also likely to give the cleanest early data, because their busy hours line up with race days.
Occupancy, weather and comfort drive the HVAC
In this first phase the system only runs HVAC monitoring and automation. It uses three inputs to set heating and cooling: how many people are in a space, the weather outside, and how comfortable occupants are. Homestead sits about 35 miles southwest of South Beach, so the weather input mostly means cooling.
For a venue whose busiest rooms fill up around race weekends, occupancy is the input most likely to matter. A system that knows when a suite level is empty can ease off the cooling there instead of holding race-day settings all week. The source material doesn't break out savings by input. So this is a reading of how the controls are built, not a reported result.
Championship Weekend shows the shape of that demand. According to the fan guide and Kaulig's preview, the speedway's ticket office opened Tuesday, Nov. 3. Truck Series practice ran Thursday evening, the Craftsman Truck Series finale went green at 7:30 p.m. EST Friday on FS1, the O'Reilly Auto Parts Series raced Saturday, and the Cup Series closed it out Sunday. Activity built over several days and then dropped off. That's the kind of swing an occupancy input is designed to follow.
The system also flags elevated carbon dioxide and equipment maintenance needs. Rising CO2 indoors usually means ventilation isn't keeping up with the number of people in a room. That makes it an air-quality alarm and a rough occupancy signal at the same time, which matters in packed hospitality spaces.
The maintenance alerts are meant to let staff fix equipment before it fails during operations. For facility managers, that changes the work: staff get alerts in real time and react to the dashboard, instead of waiting for a complaint from a suite. The alerts go to operators wherever they are. On race weekend, that means the person responsible doesn't have to be standing in the mechanical room to see a problem coming.
How much weight the 15% can carry
The savings figure has two qualifiers built in. It's NASCAR's estimate, and it's a ceiling: up to 15% a year, from a system that only went live this month and still has five support buildings to add. The 15% belongs in a forecast. The first full year of dashboard data is what tells you whether it belongs in a budget.
The phased rollout also complicates any early comparison. Savings measured while only the three hospitality areas are connected won't describe the finished system. And because a lot depends on staff acting on the alerts, results could vary with how the system is run, not just with what's installed.
The scope will grow in another direction too. NASCAR plans to bring more building utilities onto the system later, water among them. The 15% describes energy from an HVAC-only first phase. When a second utility shows up on the same dashboard, operators would do well to keep its results in a separate column so a water figure doesn't get read as part of the energy estimate.
The 15% belongs in a forecast. The first full year of dashboard data is what tells you whether it belongs in a budget.
Where Homestead fits in the ABB-NASCAR program
Homestead is the latest project under NASCAR IMPACT, the sport's sustainability initiative, and the electrification partnership that ABB and NASCAR launched in 2024. That partnership covers vehicles, infrastructure and energy management. ABB had already installed an energy management system at NASCAR's Research and Development Center in Charlotte, North Carolina, and EV charging equipment at Daytona International Speedway.
NASCAR also says it wants to explore sharing energy performance data with fans, possibly on a public-facing scoreboard. The partnership has already gone fan-facing once: EnergyTech has also covered an energy monitoring and race control fan experience that ABB and NASCAR debuted at the San Diego street race. A Homestead scoreboard would take that same instinct and point it at a permanent facility's own building data.
That would put a facility's energy numbers in front of a crowd, which raises the bar for metering accuracy and baselines. Any operator thinking about a similar display should get the measurement settled before the signage goes up.
Questions for venue and campus operators
For facility leaders weighing a similar system, especially those whose buildings sit mostly empty between event days, the Homestead rollout points to a few questions worth asking before signing anything:
- Which spaces have the biggest swings in occupancy and the highest comfort expectations, and can they go first so they produce clean early data?
- Where will the occupancy input come from (ticketing, sensors or a schedule), and how often will the controls get it?
- What baseline will the savings be measured against, and who checks the result before it shows up in a budget, or on a scoreboard?
Sources
Featured companies
Your experts belong here
Every story in MarketScale Building Management starts with a company putting its facilities engineers, energy managers, and service technicians on the record. Buyers are already reading this topic. The only question is whose experts they find.
Owners and facilities teams pick on trust, and your engineers turn that trust into inbound conversations.
About the author
The MarketScale Newsroom reports on the companies, technologies, and trends shaping 16 B2B industries. It turns primary sources and expert commentary into clear, useful coverage for the people doing the work.
