It’s not entirely apples-to-apples but there is a proven model similar to what Jeff Andrews is calling ‘The Corey Day Plan’ at Hendrick Motorsports.
Corey Heim already has two Cup Series victories with 23XI Racing in the Brickyard 400 and the inaugural event at NAS North Island even before going full-time next season. This is in addition to a Truck Series championship and 26 career wins at that level.
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Toyota was forced to slowly introduce Heim because there was nowhere in Cup to put him until 23XI had a full-time seat open up but the driver was given every opportunity to learn and succeed.
To date, Heim has 15 starts.
Again, this is not the same but Hendrick Motorsports is going to loan Day out to Spire Motorsports for five-to-six races next year in addition to a second full-time effort in the in-house No. 17 in the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series.
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This will be Day’s second full-time season on pavement altogether after showing himself to be something of a dirt Sprint Car prodigy over the past five years. He is currently just 20 years old so Andrews is adamant that there is a lot of time to figure out what all over this eventually becomes.
“We want to get through next year and then really start to understand what ’28 looks like,” Andrews said during a Saturday morning press conference at Gateway. “That could be full-time Cup, that could be a combination of doing the same thing we’re doing in ’27 with him. We just need to see how that goes.
“I think every driver and every team is different. I would say specific to Hendrick Motorsports, we’ve not had a driver development program, so to speak, in the past and I think we would call this more of a Corey Day Development Program.
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“We’re interested in him, obviously (he’s) an immense talent in the sport and obviously great for our company and we want to be involved in continuing to growing and advancing him through the sport or through the series, wherever that may be.”
Day recognizes there is a similarity here.
“I think it’s obviously gone, like you said, really well for Corey Heim this year,” Day said. “And he’s an amazing talent as well. He, from my understanding, puts in a lot of work during the week and is a real study of this stuff.
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“So he’s definitely a good model for what I think I’m going to need to put in to get what I want out of it for sure. But I’m definitely confident and honestly, very thankful that I’m going to get some trial runs at it before I’m just thrown in there in a full-time season or whatever that may be.”
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Day only made a handful of Late Model, ARCA and Truck Series starts before his full-time NOAPS program this season. Even then, the current-generation Cup Series car is unlike anything else in NASCAR too.
“The cars are just so much different that I was able to kind of swim when I got in these cars because I’m okay with driving sideways, driving the car hard too, but Cup cars seem to be on the other side of that,” Day said. “So, I’m definitely glad I’m going to get those five-to-six races for sure.”
With one race down in the nine-race Chase for the Championship, Day is fifth in the standings with two victories at Talladega and Dover, respectively. His progress has been uneven, in that he is fast, but there have also been numerous incidents all season too as he acclimates to a different discipline.
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“I feel like there’s been times where I have felt like, ‘okay, now I know how to put a whole race together,’ and ‘Okay, now I feel like I have the speed,’ but it hasn’t just been one time where that light bulb went off and it all clicked,” Day said. “It’s all happened at different times and I expected that.
“I didn’t expect it to be like, one day I show up to the track and get the pole and win the race. I knew that it was going to be tough and I was going to learn things at different paces and that’s I think what happened.”
Managing conflict
Day finished second last week at Darlington but needed to recover from several run-ins with Joe Gibbs Racing driver William Sawalich, whom threatened retaliation, and told him to go ‘(expletive) himself’ on pit road.
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The two drivers ran into each other in Stage 2 and then had another incident that resulted in Day forcing Sawalich to choose between lifting and getting into the wall.
How does Andrews teach Day to manage conflict like that?
“I’ll just start by saying we’ve had those situations within our four walls to deal with too,” Andrews said. “So first and foremost, I think it’s important for Corey and last week’s case for William to communicate about that and for them talk after the race, which they did.
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“I’m not saying you always are going to agree on those things, but of course we’re supportive of Corey and we understand those things are going to happen. It’s just you want to see the kind of maturing and the continual improvements in his race craft, which we have and I think he showed that it would have been real easy in that situation, during the race, for that night to have gone the wrong way, but the team and Corey pulled themselves together and pulled a great finish out of that.
“Specific to the drivers, I’d like to think that the two of them will continue to work on that and Corey has good relationships with many in the garage area and we’ll continue to help him build those relationships.”
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