Carson Hocevar swears he won’t change. He will use the same style for The Chase that kept him above The Chase cutline for the entire regular season. The same style that got him his win at Talladega.
The Spire Motorsports driver has appeared to stop caring about what other people say and think. "We raced how we raced, and I think we've done a pretty good job with it," Hocevar told me last week at Chase media day. "The mistake would be trying to change who we are or what we do in The Chase, and that's where a lot of guys try really hard and try too hard and try to get more.
"We can just race and just have fun with it. We’re only going to be as fast as we can make our cars and do as good as we can." Is he still having fun after Darlington, where he got into Brad Keselowski in a situation Sunday where it appeared to be avoidable? Keselowski indicated Hocevar has one coming.
In response, Hocevar decided to give an extra six percent (Keselowski’s car number) off on a merchandise sale he had going on through his online platform. Social media and industry talk shows have focused on his non-apologetic attitude — an attitude that looks like could come back to bite him. "I've just had fun this week with everything," Hocevar said on a virtual news conference on Wednesday.
"But I haven't really watched. I'm not sitting there consuming everything. I make my posts, but normally I post something and I disappear.
I don't even look at the reaction. "If I don't really look at the reaction, I stay truer to myself personally because I'm not able to jump fences for what's the popular take, right? I can just state my opinion and not get biased." Hocevar doesn’t have many friends in the garage.
Ross Chastain co-owns the driver management company whose clients include Hocevar, and Chastain worked with Hocevar when they were teammates in trucks at Niece Motorsports. "He’s leaning into it. He’s being Carson," Chastain told me and other reporters Tuesday night at a NASCAR Foundation event in New York City.
"What you see is the Carson I’ve known from the truck series on. He’s Carson. We’re watching him grow up right before our eyes. …
That’s putting eyeballs on us. Because you’re watching the chaos. "The nickname [of Hurricane Hocevar] is appropriate as we’re watching a kid grow up." Some don't view Hocevar’s attitude on the track as being his biggest issue.
Instead, it's him embracing the social influencer life and doing things that some believe are designed to sell merchandise or to create a brand on social. As an aside, Hocevar says he does nearly all his own posts. What’s wrong with that?
Nothing, really, as long as a driver wins occasionally. Hocevar has one Cup win, albeit just 15 races ago. He doesn’t necessarily have to challenge for titles.
Just winning two or three races a year should serve to show that it isn’t all about selling merch. In the meantime, he is going to do it his way. "We want to enjoy this, and not just sit back and not say anything, not do anything, or run [minding] our p's and q's, per se, and fall in line, and be like ‘Oh OK, we’ve got to wait until our turn’," Hocevar said Wednesday.
"And well it might not ever be our turn. [So] we can't have an opinion because we haven't won enough races or whatever? "There’s 200 people in this building [at Spire] that this is their first-ever Chase, and they got two cars and they’ve got two opportunities. It’s not racing for a championship, per se, this year, but it’s Chase experience." Certainly the side show of the Joe Gibbs Racing lawsuit against Spire Motorsports over the hiring of Chris Gabehart doesn’t help.
Denny Hamlin criticized Spire on his podcast. He said that the organization doesn't have any adults in the room to mentor Hocevar and no one's telling him what he's doing wrong. That was certainly a dig.
The bad blood between the two organizations goes way deeper than a few Hocevar transgressions. Hocevar didn’t let the Hamlin quip go unnoticed when he talked to the media on Wednesday. "I care about my race team, what they think, what they say … you know, the adults in the room," Hocevar said during a 42-minute media session.
Chastain indicated he is still a Hocevar fan. And of course his is because he has a business interest in Hocevar’s success. "I'll still jump up and down when he wins," Chastain said.
"Selfishly, I'd like him to not take my fenders off on his way to it but his cars are so fast right now. He's bouncing into us, and he's still going forward. So until we get faster than him, I can't really say much because I can't keep up with him.
"He is that fast. We saw that talent early on." Hocevar insists there was nothing intentional about his spinning Keselowski and felt it was a racing incident. Some would say a driver with his talent would be able to control a car and not do that — unless the driver is being careless.
"Sometimes just s— happens," Hocevar said Wednesday. "I wasn’t trying to spin him out or wreck him or anything." A driver needs more than raw speed to be successful. They need to know how to manage races and driver relationships in a way that also allows them to get the most out of their racing and mental strengths.
So far, it’s debatable whether Hocevar has found the right mix. And how far he can go until he finds it. He swears he doesn't need to and that he isn’t looking to go all that far this year.
"We’re not going to look at the points," Hocevar told me last week about The Chase. "We're just going to have fun with it, see where it goes. We’ve got a lot of years doing this.
"Our cars aren't dominant. We don't seem to be the dominant manufacturer. We're just going to have fun with it and see where we stack up.
And hope it’s not last."
