TALLADEGA, Ala. — Carson Hocevar was hanging all the way out of his car as it circled the massive, mighty Talladega, sitting on the window sill, pumping up the gathered crowd with both hands. Hey, when you win your first career Cup series victory, you damn well better make a statement. A hazardous, potentially catastrophic and likely-to-be-banned-soon statement, yes, but a statement all the same.
Ladies and gentlemen, NASCAR’s newest star has arrived … and he’s hanging out the driver’s window.
A kid in the Talladega infield, staring up at one of the monstrous video screens showing Hocevar’s look-ma-no-hands maneuver, apparently couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. “How’s he doing that?” he asked, and it’s a question the rest of the field was wondering in the race’s closing laps.
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“I soaked every bit of it in,” Hocevar said afterward. “I think I can tell you what everybody was wearing, where every seat was, where every 77 was. I think I could have pointed it all out because I remember it so clearly right now. That means more than anything else to me.”
Driving the No. 77 Chili’s Chevrolet, Hocevar claimed the Jack Link’s 500 at Talladega with both style and speed, avoiding carnage early and outrunning the competition late. He beat Chris Buescher to the line by 0.114 seconds, setting off a raucous celebration in the stands and along pit road. His crew, clad in Chili’s firesuits stylized to look like cowboy jeans and pearl-snap shirts, whooped and celebrated in Victory Lane, reveling in just the second victory in Spire Motorsports’ seven-plus-year history.
Hocevar is perhaps the most obvious case of manifesting dreams into reality in NASCAR. He grew up a NASCAR fan, sleeping under a Dale Earnhardt Jr. comforter, with signed memorabilia from Kyle Busch and Matt Kenseth on his shelves. He tracked his iRacing exploits on his long-dormant Instagram page @chr-racing. He remains obsessed with NASCAR, his YouTube algorithm feeding him a constant stream of old races.
For his entire life, Hocevar has trained himself for this moment. At 23, he’s already raced 91 times at the Cup level, 90 of them without a victory. Tall and angular, he cuts a distinctive figure both at the track and on it. While he’s won praise from fans and for his unconventional — to put it mildly — approach to Cup-level racing, he’s also enraged the drivers who run alongside him.
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Ryan Blaney once called Hocevar a “moron.” Denny Hamlin has accused him of “d*** move”s. And Hocevar has brought Kyle Busch to a boil with his on-track antics.
“I don’t care if I wreck the whole f***ing field, I’m over him,” Busch raged over the radio after an incident at Atlanta early last year. “He’s a f***ing douchebag, I’m gonna wreck his ass.”
“You certainly prefer someone who tries too hard for someone who doesn’t try at all, but there’s certainly a sweet spot there that I think each driver, to some degree, has to find on their own,” Brad Keselowski — who knows a thing or two about being the cocky young fireball knocking heads with his elders — said of Hocevar in July 2024.
Victory, particularly victory earned straight-up through talent, has a way of clarifying one’s vision. Hocevar has cleared the first hurdle to Cup success, and now he and Spire can reset their goals.
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“This kid knows how to stand on the gas,” Spire co-owner Jeff Dickerson said after the race. “He has probably the most irrational confidence of a driver I’ve ever seen. That somehow pays off.”
The race began on a mellow note. A reworked, extra-long 98-lap first stage proceeded without incident, as most teams stayed at lower throttle to keep the stage a single-stop one. The result was one of the more placid stages of the entire season, a gentle tour around the plains of East Alabama.
The carnage kicked off 18 laps into the second stage, on Lap 116. Ross Chastain bumped Bubba Wallace from behind, setting off a massive wreck that decimated the field:
The crash involved 25 of the 40 cars in the field, including big names like Kyle Larson, Hamlin, Busch and Logano.
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Twelve drivers won their first career race at Talladega, and Hocevar spent the final laps trying to join their number. The two-by-two racing dominated the last few laps, with Hocevar and Buescher dueling for the lead. Hocevar, on the low line, and Buescher, on the high one, dueled side by side through the final laps. Hocevar managed to hang on for the victory as cars spun behind him.
And then … that celebration.
“He looked like Shamu hanging out the window,” Dickerson laughed. “It’s just like, ‘Man, we’re gonna get fined after our first one.’”
As newly named NASCAR CEO Steve O’Donnell looked on, Hocevar detailed exactly how he pulled off the stunt — briefly detaching the wheel, dropping the clutch, finding the throttle with his long legs, and guiding the car along the edge of chaos and disaster to the delight of the fans in attendance.
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“Ultimately, I’ve lost a lot of these and known how bad it sucks to lose them,” he said. “The biggest thing is, I just wanted to take it all in.”
With one stretch run at Talladega, one win, one memorable celebration, Hocevar validated every bit of the faith that everyone, from his family to his friends to Spire, has shown in him for so many years.
“We saw a star in the making,” Dickerson said, “and today it looks like we knew what we were doing.”
Hocevar came walking into the media center for his post-race conference carrying an arch of flowers better fit for a Kentucky Derby winner than a Talladega one. Granted, it’s way too early to put any kind of savior-of-the-sport burden on his shoulders like that. Getting the crowd already at a NASCAR race to pop off is one thing, getting the people who’ve stopped going to buy back in is another.
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Bottom line, though, Hocevar already possesses the rare blend of NASCAR alchemy — talent, charisma, confidence and trash-talking — that would have made him an icon in any NASCAR era prior to 2010. (He definitely would’ve gotten punched by Cale Yarborough, spun by Dale Earnhardt and scorched by Tony Stewart.) Will he be the kind of crossover star that NASCAR has sought and needed since Dale Earnhardt Jr.? Maybe, maybe not. At the very least, he’s starting to become the champion he’d wanted to be so long ago.
“I’ve dreamt about this, and it feels like I’m really living the dream that I dreamt and thought of and daydreamed,” he said. “Now it’s all getting clear. Everything [in the dream] was kind of blurry. I didn’t know the faces. I didn’t know what it was all going to look like. But now it’s just kind of all cleared out. All the bodies were there, and now I just have faces to put to them. And reactions. And everything.”