For a long time, Carson Hocevar has been collecting enemies.
Not trophies, necessarily. Enemies.
The 23-year-old has developed a reputation for making aggressive moves, irritating fellow competitors and generally behaving like a man who believes the racing gods gave him two lives and he intends to use both of them.
But there has been one important ingredient missing from the Hocevar story.
Confrontation.
Drivers have complained. Drivers have talked about him. Drivers have been irritated with him.
But nobody had really stepped up and told Hocevar to his face that enough was enough.
Until Saturday night at Bristol Motor Speedway.
Ryan Blaney changed that.
And Hocevar made sure everyone in the NASCAR garage understood what happened next.
With the green flag waving on lap 459, Ty Gibbs led the field while Hocevar ran second and Blaney was fighting for position.
Blaney eventually got past Hocevar, but Hocevar immediately tried to cross him over.
Blaney protected the bottom.
Hocevar kept coming.
The two made contact and Blaney’s No. 12 Ford spun into the outside wall, ending his race and leaving him with absolutely no interest in discussing the finer points of racing etiquette over a cup of tea.
“I left him plenty of room for a lap before that,” Blaney said afterward. “I didn’t chop him. I didn’t run him into the fence or nothing like I easily could have. I protected the bottom and he just decided he wanted to be there and didn’t lift and wrecked me.”
Blaney had already decided what was coming.
“Something is gonna happen,” he said when asked if he intended to speak with Hocevar.
And something did.
After the race, Blaney found Hocevar on pit road.
There was no lengthy diplomatic summit.
Blaney shoved him.
Hocevar shoved back.
Then Hocevar threw the first punch.
The two had to be separated.
And when it was over, Hocevar raised a fist toward the Bristol crowd, which responded with a roar.
That image may have been more important to the rest of the garage than the fight itself.
Because whatever anyone thinks about Hocevar’s driving—and there are clearly plenty of opinions—Saturday night established something that had been missing from his reputation.
He isn’t backing down.
“I wasn’t going to take it,” Hocevar said.
There was no apology. No attempt to pretend the whole thing had been a misunderstanding between two gentlemen who had simply become confused about which direction the racetrack went.
Hocevar said Blaney “just kind of said one thing and then went after me.”
And then came the line that might have been the most revealing of the night.
“I don’t think anybody is left behind me, so they got an old-school Bristol show here.”
Apparently, Hocevar had decided that if Bristol wanted entertainment, he was perfectly happy to provide it.
Blaney, meanwhile, made it clear that his frustration with Hocevar goes well beyond Saturday night.
“I haven’t had a problem with him for probably a year and a half, but it’s getting old,” Blaney said.
That may be the bigger story.
Hocevar has been irritating drivers for some time. Now one of them finally confronted him, and Hocevar didn’t retreat.
Quite the opposite.
He stood there, threw a punch and then turned toward the crowd as if he had just completed the final lap of a race.
The rest of the field was watching.
And they learned something.
If you’re going to race Carson Hocevar aggressively, you can expect him to race back.
And if you decide to take the argument off the track, you probably shouldn’t assume he’ll suddenly become interested in conflict resolution.
Hocevar finished third Saturday night.
He missed out on the victory, which clearly bothered him far more than the fight.
“It doesn’t really mean s— because we didn’t win the race,” he said.
But he did leave Bristol with something else.
A reputation that had previously been built largely on what he was willing to do with a race car now has another chapter.
Carson Hocevar isn’t afraid to stand his ground.
The garage just got the memo.
Greg was a writer for DriveTribe supporting Amazon's The Grand Tour and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, and a Masters degree in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek and a regular contributor to Forbes.
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