Portage’s Carson Hocevar looks for first NASCAR Cup Series win in home state

• Carson Hocevar, last year’s NASCAR Rookie of the Year, is considered a rising star and has two second-place Cup Series finishes this season.
• He is looking for his first Cup Series win, and racing in his home state of Michigan could provide an advantage.
• Hocevar’s aggressive driving style has drawn criticism from other drivers, particularly after an incident with Ricky Stenhouse Jr.

Even for a NASCAR driver, Carson Hocevar loves to drive.

In just the first week of June, he’ll run nearly a month’s worth of races. He started in Nashville, Tennessee, last weekend on the NASCAR Cup Series, placing second, then headed north to Michigan for the Money in the Bank 150 at Berlin Raceway on Tuesday, June 3. This weekend at Michigan International Speedway in Brooklyn, Michigan, he will compete in two more races: the DQS Solutions & Staffing 250 on the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series on Saturday, June 7, and the FireKeepers Casino 400 in the Cup Series on Sunday, June 8.

Add it all up, and he has driven more than 550 miles already this week and will add more than 650 miles this weekend — over 1,200 miles in eight days.

Isn’t he tired?

“No,” Hocevar told the Free Press on Friday, June 6. “No, not at all. I feel like the more I race, the more comfortable I am.”

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Hocevar is considered a rising star in NASCAR, and his performance this season has only added to that perception. Last season’s NASCAR Rookie of the Year, Hocevar has improved tremendously since, adding second-place Cup Series finishes in Atlanta and Nashville while driving for Spire Motorsports. He holds the most second-place finishes in Spire’s Cup Series history.

The only thing he doesn’t have is a Cup Series win. As a collective, Spire has won one race since its inception in 2018 — Justin Haley’s 2019 Daytona 500. But Hocevar might soon add a second. On the track, he is coming in on one of the hottest streaks of his career, and racing in the Truck Series will likely only add to his confidence.

And he also has an intangible boost: The power of the home race. Hocevar, a Portage native, has the home crowd advantage, as well as energy from a week spent with family and friends.

“Ultimately, if you want to have momentum any given week and feel a little bit better going into one, going home is exactly the right time to do that,” Hocevar said. “It helps, too, that my home racetrack is a type of track that we feel is our strongest so that that just makes it even more exciting.”

One thing that could derail his weekend is, ironically, his own driving.

Hocevar has developed a reputation as a driver willing to push the limits — and, in some drivers’ estimation, go beyond them.

Just last weekend, Hocevar’s No. 77 Chevrolet hit Ricky Stenhouse Jr. from behind at lap 107, ending Stenhouse’s race and knocking him out of a playoff spot for now. Stenhouse threatened retaliation earlier this week. Hocevar’s reputation, and the feeling among those in the NASCAR community that the hit on Stenhouse was unnecessary have led to drivers such as Denny Hamlin saying that Hocevar is driving overly recklessly.

For his part, Hocevar said that he and Stenhouse have since texted about the incident and he expects no retaliation on Sunday.

“We just go racing,” Hocevar said. “At the end of it, we’re all racing and pushing to the limit. And we make 1,000 decisions a race, and sometimes the only ones you see is the ones when we make it wrong.”

If Hocevar can stay clear of any extraneous race issues, he feels he has a shot to sweep the weekend’s races.

“That’d be a pretty good memory of the first (win),” Hocevar said.

All he has to do is drive his race. He has proven he can get to the edge of victory. Now he needs to see the checkered flag first.

Matthew Auchincloss is a reporter with the Detroit Free Press. Connect at mauchincloss@freepress.com.