Carson Hocevar grew up watching Cup races at Michigan International Speedway as a fan. And on Sunday, he returned as a Cup driver, started from the front after Denny Hamlin dropped to the rear, led 21 laps at his home track, and still walked away, saying, “There were a few moves that didn’t work out”. The speed was there, the opportunity was there, but what went wrong was most precisely diagnosed by Hamlin, with the nine-car wreck Hocevar triggered at the center of it all.
“I truly believe if he would just take a chill pill, he would be way better off than what he is right now,” Denny Hamlin said on his podcast Actions Detrimental.
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“If you had a bar of like you were racing the NASCAR game and it’s like: How good are you at short tracks, intermediate, superspeedways, speed, qualifying, racecraft? The racecraft bar is really low. It’s really, really low. And what I’m seeing is that, while it seems probably like in the moment for him that he’s making the right moves, he’s just killing his own momentum.”
Hamlin’s comments came after the Lap 83 restart at the FireKeepers Casino 400 offered the clearest evidence yet. Hocevar had been a strong contender throughout the race’s first half when his No. 77 made contact with John Hunter Nemechek’s No. 42 while attempting a move on the inside lane. The latter spun across the track and triggered a chain-reaction that collected nine cars, including points leader Reddick, who had won Stage 1 and was running race-winning speed before suffering his first DNF of the season.
Over the radio, Hamlin summed it up immediately: “He gets so f*cking excited and just can’t help it.”
And stats seem to back what Hamlin was pointing at. In the first 15 races of the season, Carson Hocevar has only led 96 laps so far with one pole position. However, the most interesting aspect is that even with all the aggressive pushing and risky maneuvers, his average finish sits at 14.2 right now, while his average start is at 10.93.
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Hocevar’s one win at Talladega would have been enough last year to get him locked into the playoffs and contend for the title, but it isn’t the case anymore. The Chase format has been reinstated, and it rewards consistency more than anything else.
But there is a bigger risk that surrounds him that ties back to Hamlin’s point.
Carson Hocevar warned of making too many enemies
Bubba Wallace, who was caught in the same wreck, framed it with the kind of clarity that only comes from having lived the same lesson.
“He’s one of the fastest in the field, and that’s his natural ability. I’ve got to give respect to it. But at the same time, Kevin Harvick told me four or five years ago, ‘Stop hitting (stuff), and your finishes will show.’ And that’s what I simply tried to tell (Hocevar), man. He’s going for every move, every second. Not worth it. He’s creating a lot of enemies. I just told him, ‘You’re fast. A lot of us are jealous of what you’re able to do. But we’re beating you because we can put a race together better than you,’” Wallace said in his post-race media availability.
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Oval racing often runs on reciprocity, from the push on a restart to the room given, and to the trust earned over time. With a Spire Motorsports contract running beyond 2030, Hocevar has the runway to figure it out. But the longer the emotionality sticks, the harder that progression curve gets. After all, almost the entire garage spoke against his actions, with Richard Childress even saying it’s a matter of “small brain”.
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