With a runner-up finish in Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race at Nashville Superspeedway and a victory in a major Super Late Model race at Berlin Raceway, Carson Hocevar has been the talk of the garage entering his home race.
Unfortunately for Hocevar, the chatter hasn’t all been positive. And his team finds itself sharing a garage stall with Ricky Stenhouse Jr. and Hyak Motorsports – the very group that Hocevar upset with contact in Tennessee.
The chatter around that incident – when Hocevar nudged Stenhouse into a spin on lap 106, leaving Stenhouse 39th and damaging his playoff hopes – has dominated much of the week. Both drivers and their fans have argued that the other could have given them a break.
It’s been a distraction amid a promising year for Hocevar and his No. 77 team.
“(Spire Motorsports co-owner) Jeff Dickerson has a really good line: ‘If you’re explaining, you’re losing.’ … I use that in this scenario,” Hocevar said. “This is the focus, now. It’s not a focus of, how do we beat the [47] car, or just winning a race. It’s how do we have this conversation with their team? This driver that we hit? All that stuff.
“That’s the difference. You just don’t want to have those conversations, because you’re not getting faster with those conversations. That’s what slows us down.”
Thankfully for Hocevar, the distraction may not last much longer. Hurt feelings between the teams have been lessened over various midweek conversations, most notably one between the 22-year-old and Stenhouse.
“After Carson called me this week, I definitely see what he was thinking that he could get to the inside of me before we turned down into the corner,” Stenhouse told SiriusXM NASCAR Radio on Friday morning. “(The) problem was, he didn’t. He said that he had committed to thinking he was going to, and unfortunately, just misjudged it and ran right into the back of us. You know, Carson and I haven’t had any issues before, and so, I appreciate him reaching out and just explaining what his thought process was in it.”
Stenhouse later added that he doesn’t “want a rivalry for running 15th. Like, if we’re battling for wins, and battling in the top five week in and week out, that’s great. But having a rivalry not competing for wins, is kind of difficult.”
Squashing any beef with Stenhouse is good for Hocevar, whose aggressive style has caught the ire of various drivers over his early Cup career.
“Me and him (Stenhouse) both have the reputation of being aggressive at times,” Hocevar admitted. “At one point, we both reminded each other that, even with those reputations, we’ve raced each other very well in clashes together. We’ve had no issues before, as he had said. And I feel like we had a decent relationship leading up to this.
“I thought it was productive,” Hocevar said of the chat. “And based off of his comments, it was received (productively).”
Now in his second full year with the Cup Series, Hocevar has made a strong early impression. The Portage, Mich., native had taken three seasons to blossom in the Craftsman Truck Series, but his 2023 run was a four-win campaign that saw him reach the Championship 4.
The potential shown that year led Hocevar to the Cup Series, where he’s quickly become a leader for the growing Spire Motorsports. As the team improves, so do Hocevar’s best runs. The rising star has suffered twice as many DNFs thus far in 2025 (four) as he had in the full 2024 season, but he’s taken part in a three-wide battle for the win at Atlanta Motor Speedway and finished second in Nashville.
In doing so, Hocevar has risen to 17th in points entering Michigan – just on the cusp of a playoff spot in a year where there have been few unexpected winners. His standing is a testament to Spire’s progress.
“You see little teams, they’ll circle their few tracks a year that they can run good at,” Hocevar said. “We don’t really have too big of a weak spot in our game right now. We can show up any week and run really good. We just want to show up and be great in these races.“
With that improvement in performance, Hocevar is finding himself among the sport’s stars more often. He’s rising into contention for wins and could become a playoff contender this fall.
Any rivalries or distractions threaten to undo that potential. But for now, those distractions seem to be minimized.
