SUPER SOPHOMORE: CARSON HOCEVAR, “NASCAR NIGHT”, AND A ROOKIE YEAR TO REMEMBER

By Mark Binetti, Senior Director of Communications & Team Services/Broadcaster

Speed. Tenacity. Physical toughness. Rapid reflexes. Lots of miles logged.

These are characteristics shared through most forms of sport, especially in the minor-professional level. Coincidentally enough, these themes are intertwined with motorsports and hockey, something that Spire Sports + Entertainment has a hand in on a daily basis.

What started off as one charter and one hockey team has now exponentially ballooned into three NASCAR Cup Series (NCS) charters, a successful and budding NASCAR CRAFTSMAN Truck Series (NCTS) program, additional business ventures, and three ECHL teams, including the Greenville Swamp Rabbits. Throughout this dedication over the landscape of these entities, unique experiences and promotions like this Saturday’s “NASCAR Night”, presented by Arthrex, are possible.

Carson Hocevar, the driver of the No. 77 Spire Motorsports Chevrolet ZL1, knows all too well about the synergies shared within his team’s ownership. As he prepares for his second full-time NCS season, the reigning NCS Sunoco Rookie of the Year comes back around for another lap for the Swamp Rabbits “NASCAR Night” as one of seven headliners of the event, featuring three-time NCS champion Joey Logano, Kyle Busch, and Bubba Wallace, in addition to his teammates Justin Haley, Michael McDowell, and Rajah Caruth.

“I’m excited to be back for ‘NASCAR Night’. It was a lot of fun last season to see how many fans love both NASCAR and hockey in the same building, so I’m looking forward to coming back for another year,” Carson Hocevar said of his return to the specialty night’s “grid”, if you will. “Being from Michigan, I was around hockey a lot growing up, so to have a night like this is quite special. To do it with the Swamp Rabbits adds even more to how special the night will be: we had our best qualified effort, and my career-best start, in the front row at Darlington with the Swamp Rabbits logo on our No. 77 car.”

Hocevar hails from Michigan, the home state of the NHL’s Detroit Red Wings, one of the league’s “Original Six” franchises. While he admits he wasn’t a massive hockey fan, he did spend time with his family watching the Red Wings, who during his childhood were in the midst of a 25-year streak making the Stanley Cup Playoffs, the third such longest run in NHL history.

“Any time they did well or were playing well, I knew and certainly kept tabs on them,” he elaborated. “My grandfather was a big Red Wings fan, so anytime he would come over it was almost always that we'd have them on the television. They were always fun to keep track of.

“Being from Michigan, I know many people from Canada. They always come to race in Michigan, or even the Midwest itself, so it’s cool that those drivers and competitors have just as equal an appreciation for both sports.”

Hocevar may not have grown up playing hockey, outside of on the street in roller blades and in PE class in school, but in his younger years, he was all about racing. He started his journey at a nearby track in Kalamazoo racing quarter midgets, which is a level of motorsports primarily restricted to those ages 5 to 16 driving midget cars scaled down to one-fourth of the size on a track that’s one-twentieth of a mile. It was love at first sight for Hocevar, who followed that passion as a six-year-old and won 79 feature races and 15 national championships at that level before taking on bigger competition as he got older.

“The second I sat in [a quarter midget], I instantly just wished I could fire it up and go race around the neighborhood, basically. Since then, this is all I’ve wanted to do,” he continued. “I don’t know when exactly I *knew* I could do this. I just knew I wanted to, and I feel like most of the time that ‘want’ just bleeds into the ‘can’. When you literally live and breathe racing, you always think you can do it.

“I feel like race car drivers are always either the most confident, especially the really good ones, or they have this delusion that if you don’t qualify well, there’s always something. ‘They’ll come back to us’, ‘we didn’t get a good set of tires’, or ‘we ran well but got unlucky’. There’s always an excuse, and for me, I think fighting past those delusions and excuses is what fuels me and others to keep going.” 

Hocevar’s journey eventually took him to the Automobile Racing Club of America (ARCA) Menards Series, a minor, semi-professional league of stock car racing, scoring nine top-10 finishes in 11 races from 2018 to 2019. He later made his debut in what is now the NCTS in 2019, and, racing primarily for Niece Motorsports, Hocevar scored 10 top-five’s and 20 top-10’s over the course of 45 races from 2019 to 2022, eventually catching the eye of Spire Motorsports.

In the 2023 NCTS season, Hocevar set the foundation for what would become his first full-time season in the NCS. Driving his final season with Niece Motorsports, Hocevar scored four wins, 11 top-five’s, and 13 top 10’s, finishing with a 3^rd place finish in the Championship Four of the NCTS. Additionally, he split five starts in the NASCAR Xfinity Series (NXS) with SS-Green Light Racing and Spire Motorsports, making four with the latter.

As luck would have it, he also made his NCS debut with Spire Motorsports that season, albeit under unique circumstances. With Chase Elliot suspended for the Enjoy Illinois 300 at Gateway Motorsports Park in Madison, Illinois, Corey Lajoie was tasked with filling his seat in the No. 9 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet. That left a void to be filled in the Spire Motorsports No. 7 Chevrolet.

“I was running the Xfinity car part time with Spire, and at the time I think we ran two races, so you could say I was in the fold of Spire,” Hocevar said. “I knew something was going down because, normally, the replacement for Chase was always Josh Berry, but he was full-time Xfinity. The way it worked out, all the Xfinity guys were going to be in Portland, Oregon.

“In a situation like that, you have two options: you either take a retired Cup Series driver, or you take a truck guy to fill in for the race. For me, that was the difference maker in getting an opportunity at a Cup Series car. It was pretty special for that to come together, just being able to take that and eventually go racing last year in 2024 for our rookie year together.”

Hocevar later finished the 2023 season with another NCS start in the No. 42 Legacy Motor Club Chevrolet at Darlington, then signed on to finish the campaign in that car for seven more races

“It kind of goes back to the confidence thing, right? I didn't have any sort of cup starts planned, and by the end of the year, I had more cup starts than I did Xfinity starts,” Hocevar said of his 2023 season. “Obviously, running super well in the truck series and running basically the last 10 races of the NCS schedule were huge. Think about it: my last race at Phoenix was in a Cup Series car to end the season, and my first race in February 2024 was in a Cup Series car, so it already kind of felt like I had a crash course, a rookie initiation, before my true rookie year.”

Hocevar started his “true rookie year”, as he put it, qualifying 9^th for the Daytona 500, and used that as a springboard to great success in the Spire Motorsports NCS Chevrolet ZL1. He qualified at a career-best 2^nd on the front row at Darlington and ultimately scored six top-10’s and a career-best 3^rd place finish at Watkins Glen after starting in 29^th in the race.

“Looking back on it, just how well we were able to progress, we were just trying to get our feet under us at the start of the year, building step by step. By the end of the season, we were consistently running inside the top 10 almost every week,” Hocevar elaborated, “so it was a lot of fun to just be able to progress as strongly as we did and have a lot of speed, especially during the playoffs when everybody's bringing their top-notch stuff.”

Under the guidance of his crew chief, Luke Lambert, he finished as the Sunoco Rookie of the Year, which is awarded to the rookie with the most championship points in a season, and his 21^st place finish in the driver standings was the highest for a driver in the history of Spire Motorsports NCS program. If that wasn’t enough, Hocevar’s pit crew logged the fastest four-tire pit stop in NASCAR history at Homestead, doing so in a blistering 8.29 seconds.

“I've only had one career cup start that Luke hasn't been with me. I had him in 2023 with the No. 42 and we ran really well together, so I was excited when he came over to Spire to continue what we started,” Hocevar said of his crew chief.  “I think he's super, super detailed and is exceptional with processes and people, just an overall tremendous leader. Being from Michigan and a fan of the Detroit Lions, I always appreciate how good Dan Campbell is as the Head Coach, and I think Luke's done sort of the same with everybody on the 77, and even in Spire as a whole. He just brings a lot to the table with respect to managing situations, managing people, and ultimately managing a race team.

“As far as the pit crew goes, we definitely knew it was quick at the time when it happened,” he continued on about their record-setting moment. “We were running around fifth, I think, and came out second on pit road. The top five positions on pit road, those are the hardest spots to get, but when the pressure's up and you’re in the top five racing with the best guys with the best crews, they know how intense and important those last few spots higher up are. I think it's more impressive that it happened with a lot of pressure and happened when we tried to have a shot to win.”

With “NASCAR Night” approaching this Saturday, Hocevar finds himself in familiar territory. He’s about to embark on a new NCS season, his sophomore campaign, in a month, but beforehand, gets to celebrate his sport, his teammates, and his ownership group at a Swamp Rabbits game. It’s a night where, once again, he finds himself simply taking it all in.

“I feel a little bit of everything. I know how this night went last year and, with anything, now I have an idea of what to expect, and with that try to make it more special than it was a year ago,” he reflected. “For last season’s ‘NASCAR Night’, I was still new to Spire and learning about and meeting new people. Now, I have these friendships and relationships that have developed, becoming very close with everybody. I think that's the most exciting part for me. It's just being able to now have these relationships and this good time with everybody that I hold close to me. We're going to go racing for many weeks here during the year, so celebrating with everyone before we really get down to it is the most exciting part for me.”

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About the Greenville Swamp Rabbits …
Acquired by Spire Sports + Entertainment (SS+E) in 2020, the Greenville Swamp Rabbits hockey team have been providing family friendly, live entertainment at Bon Secours Wellness Arena since 2010. Formerly the Greenville Road Warriors, the Swamp Rabbits are the highest-level professional minor league franchise in South Carolina. The Swamp Rabbits are the proud ECHL affiliate of the NHL's LA Kings and the AHL's Ontario Reign. Greenville is a member of the ECHL, Premier ‘AA’ Hockey League.