Ever since their ARCA Menards Series feuds back in 2021, there has been the overarching feeling that Corey Heim is straight-up blacklisted by Joe Gibbs Racing, simply because of Ty Gibbs.
While it's one of those things that can't really be confirmed one way or the other, unless someone comes right out and says it, the proof has been in the pudding for years.
Heim has been one of Toyota's top young prospects, if not the manufacturer's outright top prospect, for years, and not just because of his runner-up finish behind Gibbs during the 2021 ARCA season with Venturini Motorsports.
He won his second race in the Craftsman Truck Series with Kyle Busch Motorsports in 2022 and added another victory four starts later. In his first two seasons as a full-time driver for Tricon Garage in 2023 and 2024, he won nine total races and went to the Championship 4 both years.
Even by then, he had already "overstayed his welcome", per se, in NASCAR's third-highest national series. He was more than ready to move up to the O'Reilly Auto Parts Series. But Joe Gibbs Racing had no interest in giving him a ride, and he ended up sticking with Tricon Garage for 2025, by which point he had become 23XI Racing's official development driver, rather than just a reserve driver.
To nobody's surprise, he won 12 out of 25 races and the championship, skyrocketing up the series' all-time wins list with a season that the series had simply never seen before.
So naturally, he was left without a full-time ride in 2026. Because that's how NASCAR seems to work these days.
Sure, he was contractually tied to 23XI Racing, but 23XI Racing and Joe Gibbs Racing have a technical alliance. And it's not like he didn't run select O'Reilly Series races for Toyota's Sam Hunt Racing from 2023 to 2025.
Let's not beat around the bush. If the manufacturer's NASCAR powerhouse wanted him to have a seat, at any point over the past five years, he 100% would have had a seat.
Draw your own conclusions.
Heim is currently running partial schedules in both the Cup Series for 23XI Racing and the Truck Series for Tricon Garage, and he's continuing to ascend the all-time wins list in the latter, with three wins in five starts this year. But more importantly, the Denny Hamlin and Michael Jordan-owned team closed out the month of May by confirming something else.
At this point, the bigger question had been whether 23XI Racing would do the right thing by finally giving him Riley Herbst's seat for 2027. Because had they not done that, the top driver in the Toyota talent pipeline of this decade very well might have been picked up by a rival manufacturer and team.
Now that move has been confirmed, as Heim is set to join Tyler Reddick and Bubba Wallace in 23XI Racing's lineup as the new driver of the No. 35 Toyota beginning next year.
At long last, the 23-year-old Marietta, Georgia native is set to have an opportunity to show the world what he is capable of on Sundays, even if that opportunity didn't come until a few years after most NASCAR fans would have liked it to.
And at long last, Heim is set to show Joe Gibbs Racing just what they missed out on, all those times they turned the other way when the opportunity to put him in a car was quite literally right in front of them.
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