Joey Logano understands why people are making the comparison. After all, Logano was once a young driver who ruffled his NASCAR Cup Series peers’ feathers and had to offer plenty of explanations and apologies.
But now, a three-time champion, Logano won’t go so far as to call Carson Hocevar a carbon copy.
“He’s definitely done it in a different way,” Logano told ESPN. “I don’t think there is much comparison to me; in some ways I think there is, but not really on the things that I went through. It’s definitely different and unique. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it.
“There are a lot of things I’m like, ‘Huh. That’s just a whole different way of doing it.'”
Logano was still a teenager when he became a Cup Series driver. With tons of talent and expectations, he was thrown in at the deep end, sometimes failed, and, in the process, got caught up in some of the sport’s most high-profile incidents. One was with Matt Kenseth in 2015, which might have cost him a championship.
Kevin Harvick and Tony Stewart are others that come to mind. Harvick, who was also rough-and-tumble early on, sold a T-shirt with a Logano quote. Stewart promised to “whip his ass” after one of their incidents.
The pattern is now repeating itself with Hocevar. The Spire Motorsports star has become one of the most talked-about drivers in the Cup Series, and at least for now, the one that his peers are tired of.
“I think anytime he’s on the racetrack, he’s kind of a highlight of some sort,” Logano said. “Whether it’s restarts or the incidents that he’s in, you kind of know something is going to happen. There aren’t many times after a race that we’re not talking about him — that he made a move or did something good or bad. There is always a storyline. He is a walking highlight reel. And there is a lot of good to be said about that for the sport, for him, for his team.
“I will say there is a balance to that: What are you trying to accomplish here? Are we trying to accomplish highlights or win championships? You have to look at that and say what’s right and what’s wrong, but everyone has their own way of going about things, and I think he’s a polarizing character on the racetrack.
“If I take the driver hat off and look at that, I probably go, ‘It’s good for the sport.’ Whether I’d root for him or not is not really the point; it’s that people are talking about it, and that’s probably OK.”
Logano and Hocevar have not had a problem with each other. The same isn’t true of Logano’s teammate, Ryan Blaney. Blaney instigated a fight with Hocevar after the Sept. 19 race at Bristol Motor Speedway, having taken exception to on-track contact. It left him with a black eye.
The two have been fine since, and even before the Bristol scuffle, Blaney admitted they’d been racing each other fine. But there is no denying that, for some reason, Hocevar has taken up the mantle of the sport’s bad boy.
“He seems to be that guy [right now],” Blaney told ESPN. “I’m not saying there is anything bad about it, but it seems to be way. I started in 2016 on the Cup side, and I can’t really think of somebody who was that way. Maybe in previous eras there was. Kyle Busch was maybe one when he came in, right? He ruffled a lot of feathers and stuff like that, but I wasn’t in the garage and competing with that at the time. So, yes, in my mind, he is that guy. Good or bad. Whatever.
“You’re always going to have that guy. Every decade there is a guy that comes along and just goes about it a certain way that some fans enjoy and some fans don’t, and most of the drivers don’t enjoy it because we have to race around that. I think it’s easy for the outside world to enjoy it, but when you’re competing, and this stuff happens to you, it’s easy not to enjoy it.”
Brad Keselowski was once that guy. He clashed with drivers like the late Busch and Carl Edwards, and those moments still live on in highlight reels today. Now he’s clashed with Hocevar, too.
“It’s hard for me to give a great answer on that because I don’t honestly think about him that much to have an answer about why he gets under people’s skin,” Keselowski told ESPN. “I can’t speak for everyone else. I can speak for myself, which is that there are a lot of intentional accidents that are a big differentiator.”
In June, during Prime Video’s pre-race coverage at Pocono Raceway, NASCAR’s data analysts shared a statistic showing Hocevar had been involved in 21 on-track incidents. It’s not a figure that would surprise his competitors.
Dale Earnhardt was not beloved when he first arrived on the scene, given his use of the bumper. Ernie Irvan apologized to his rivals in a driver’s meeting because his aggressiveness had been making waves. There is a reason that Cale Yarborough gave Darrell Waltrip the nickname “Jaws”: because Waltrip always seemed involved in something and had plenty to say.
Hocevar has earned plenty of his own insults from fellow drivers and, in the era of social media, online. Spire Motorsports took some of those, such as “absolute weapon,” “moron” and “immature,” and created a graphic for their driver about blocking out the noise before the Chase started.
For Denny Hamlin, it’s clear cut where Hocevar stands in the history of controversial NASCAR drivers.
“I think what would be different would be the antagonizing outside of the car,” Hamlin said. “That, to me, is probably what makes him a little different than the other ones.”
No, Hocevar is not the first driver to make headlines. He certainly won’t be the last.
And he knows that, too.
“I think every case is its own,” he said. “Everyone is unique in their own way in this garage. I think it’s a cycle. History tends to repeat itself; it’s just always a little different.”
