It’s been an eventful week with a lot of negative headlines this past week for Carson Hocevar.
Since flying into Mexico City for the inaugural Viva Mexico 250 last week, Hocevar called the largest city in the country a ‘shit hole,’ crashed Ricky Stenhouse Jr. for the second time in two weeks, this time from one lap down late in the race, issued an apology to both the country and his peer, and was then fined $50,000 by Spire Motorsports for his behavior.
To cap it off, he was likely denied a Truck Series win on Friday at Pocono under somewhat dubious circumstances, the byproduct of a no-win scenario where he felt like he was forced to jump the final restart over the ultimately victorious Layne Riggs.
No, Hocevar has not reached out to Stenhouse, who threatened to ‘kick your ass when we get back to the United States,’ because there isn’t a lot to be said. He knew in real time that he screwed up and that Stenhouse doesn’t want to hear it.
“No, unfortunately,” Hocevar said during a press conference on Saturday morning at Pocono. “I’m not sure what I could what I would say, right? You know, there’s nothing that really would change it, right? We’ve already had that conversation.
“I feel like we have a good relationship or, you know, had one. I was just running behind him, just kind of logging laps and, you know, just locked up in a very dumb spot. And it was just so dumb, really. Just a mistake that didn’t need to happen and didn’t want it to happen. But there’s nothing that I could do or say.
“You know, I can’t buy him a Hallmark card and, you know, really make things better. So, it sucks. It sucks for me because he’s the only NASCAR driver that owns a Sprint Car team, and I love Sprint Cars. So it sucks because I want to go talk to him about Sprint Cars. So, yeah, hopefully everything can be set but I know that the scorecard has me ahead right now, unfortunately.”
For his part, Stenhouse said earlier in the week that his wife calmed him down, but Hocevar is aware that he has to be extremely cautious anytime they are racing each other for the time being.
And if Stenhouse must retaliate, Hocevar said he hopes it is at least ‘artistic’ in a sense.
“But yeah, I mean, just ultimately — like it could be tomorrow or it could be six months from now, right,” Hocevar said. “It would be very hypocritical for me to then lose my mind and be frustrated. I’ve been a fan for a very long time. You’ve seen these stories before. It’s not, by no means, the first time.
“So, hopefully, for my sake, it doesn’t happen and we can race, and if I need to, you know, we can point him by whatever. But I know how frustrated I was that I brought this back up because I thought we were good. And I let him go because I was a lap down or whatever, and I was just riding behind him and then I locked up. You live in the world you make for yourself, and this is the world I’ve made.”
Hocevar also said he wanted to make clear that he isn’t oblivious to his negative reputation and that he also holds himself to a higher standard in every facet of his career. He says people seem to think he doesn’t care about the reputation, and he says that isn’t true.
“I’m very hard on myself,” Hocevar said. “When I qualified second, I’m just cussing myself out, basically. So, when I do something really dumb or hit somebody, right, like, people just don’t see that because you just go to your hotel room and bang your head against the wall, basically.”
He says he’s trying to avoid negative patterns, which he concedes, he’s not doing a good job of right now.
“But when you’re constantly making aggressive moves like we’re doing, it’s balancing that fine line of making a thousand moves a day,” Hocevar said. “Just unfortunately, what people remember isn’t always the good ones. You always remember the negative ones. So that’s just trying to limit the negative ones a lot more.”
Read more: What happened late in the Truck Series race?
As for Friday in the Truck Series race, Layne Riggs became the control car at the very last minute when leader Corey Heim fell off the pace with a flat tire. When that happened, Hocevar moved up to the front row but Riggs never launched until the very last minute, not realizing that was his role.
Hocevar could have waited until the second restart zone line, where the starter would have thrown the green flag but he was worried about getting run over from behind because Riggs just kept slowing down the pace.
“I wish I just at least waited to the second line,” Hocevar said. “But with me starting to get pushed and having Michigan truck restarts in my head, I just decided to go and see what they would have called considering the pace was a lot slower, and they called us.
“So, you know, I felt like I did the best to try to at least give ourselves a fighting shot, where if I kept backing the field down because he was kind of waiting on me to go, that we probably would have gotten spun anyways and the race is over.”
As for all the negative headlines, Hocevar knows now that it’s going to take a long time to correct his reputation, potentially even years, despite the natural talent and speed that had him directly promoted to Cup from the Truck Series two years ago.
“I already have that image, right,” Hocevar said. “Like it’ll never go away. I could go three years from now and it’s just like – oh, ‘I’m back,’ so to say. I think I’ve already made that image before I got in this garage, and I think it’s just trying to balance one thing of owning it and trying to change the narrative while still being like, ‘Yeah, I get it.’ Like I’m aware of this and knowing that.”
