Corey Heim capped off perhaps the most dominant season in NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series history on Friday night, winning at Phoenix Raceway to capture the championship.
He set all-time Truck Series records in wins (12) and laps led (1,625), and he led at least once in every single race. In the season's final 11 events, he won eight times and finished no worse than third.
Heim never should've had to do all of that in the first place, because he shouldn't have even been running in the Truck Series this season. Everybody knows it, except for Michael Jordan and Denny Hamlin.
Corey Heim made 23XI Racing's Riley Herbst decision look even dumber than expected
When 23XI Racing announced Riley Herbst would drive their new No. 35 Toyota for the 2025 Cup Series season instead of Heim, everybody knew this was strictly a money-based decision. The Las Vegas native brings funding from Monster Energy on a business-to-business deal with the convenience store chain Terrible's, owned by his family.
"Terrible" may be too kind of a word to describe Herbst's Cup Series rookie year. He finished 35th in points, dead-last among full-time drivers not named Cody Ware. He didn't record a single top 10 finish. His best result was 14th at Texas Motor Speedway, a race with extremely high attrition. He recorded an average running position inside the top 20 only three times, and two of them came on superspeedways.
All of this was while driving for an organization whose two other drivers, Tyler Reddick and Bubba Wallace, both made the playoffs. Heim also ran four Cup Series races for 23XI Raceway, and in them, he beat Herbst's season-best 14th place effort twice.
In the Truck Series, meanwhile, he built upon a campaign in which he was already the class of the field, and he created a complete league of his own. If you've ever wondered what would happen if you took a playoff-level Cup Series driver and made him run in NASCAR's third-best series full-time, Heim has given you the answer.
It was obvious in 2024 that Heim was more than ready to graduate to Cup, and yet TRICON Garage had no choice but to field a truck for him again because the team that's supposedly developing him chose the pay driver route.
Oh, and it gets even better: he might have to run it back again next year!
All indications are that Herbst will return to 23XI Racing and Heim will likely run a split schedule between the Cup Series, Truck Series, and the rebranded O'Reilly Auto Parts Series (formerly Xfinity Series). Welcome to NASCAR, where money speaks louder than talent.