After Corey Heim became the first driver since the legendary A.J. Foyt in 1965 to score his second NASCAR Cup Series victory within the first 15 starts of his career, all anybody actually wanted to talk about was Carson "Dale Earnhardt" Hocevar and the absolutely generational ninth-place performance from the driver who lost eight positions from his starting spot.
The 24-year-old Marietta, Georgia, native's post-race press conference might as well have been called "All About Carson Hocevar", simply because the driver of the No. 77 Spire Motorsports Chevrolet flipped off the driver of the No. 67 23XI Racing for being faster than he is, and that's all anybody was interested in. Nobody wanted to talk about the actual race.
The post-race Hocevar Fan Fest resulted in Heim, who isn't set to run full-time until 2027, justifiably calling out the media for spending way too much time talking about a guy who finished ninth. To be fair, ninth is Hocevar's seventh-best finish of 2026. For as much as he's talked about, he doesn't run up front nearly as much.
But the Heim-Hocevar rivalry runs deep, and there's no sign of that pure hatred going away any time soon. If you ask Denny Hamlin, it might just be the only father-son relationship in racing where they actually despise each other.
Hocevar is in his third full season at the Cup level, and really since the start of the 2025 campaign, he's been viewed as exactly the villain NASCAR needs for his willingness to ruffle feathers without caring what anybody thinks about him or how he goes about his business.
Whether that changes if and when anybody starts paying him back remains to be seen, but the fact that it hasn't happened yet, after all this time of everybody else supposedly being ticked off at him, sort of justifies why Hocevar is viewed in such a different way as far as his ability to potentially move the needle in a sport that has lacked big personalities for years. He's one of the few who isn't actually scared to cause a stir at any given point in time, warranted or not.
But just how much of a help is that for NASCAR in the mainstream when that driver is not a serious contender?
Sure, Hocevar was fifth in points a few weeks ago, but that was never sustainable. He somehow didn't have a single DNF, despite his aggressive driving style. At no point this season would it have been accurate to say that he was having the fifth-best season of anybody. Now with back-to-back finishes of outside the top 30, he's dropped all the way out of the top 10. Go figure.
While everyone has billed the Heim vs. Hocevar "rivalry" as the next big thing and the battle that is going to bring fans back to the sport in droves, that only has potential if Hocevar actually becomes a championship contender.
Spire Motorsports hadn't emerged as true top team until this year (and, of course, Hamlin and basically all of Joe Gibbs Racing have their own theory as to why that is), so we'll give him a pass for his sub-20th place championship finishes in 2024 and 2025. But he is nowhere near being good enough yet for the "villain" label to actually be effective. Forget Dale Earnhardt and Kyle Busch; at this point, he's not even on par with 2022/2023-era Ross Chastain.
Again, give him credit for not caring what people think. But how much of that is truly being himself, versus trying to emulate others who have raced and acted similarly? Better yet, how much of that is the media trying to make him into someone he's not just to cook up this whole villain narrative?
It's a cute storyline and everything: "Driver who acts like Ricky Bobby but rarely finishes inside top 10 causes MAJOR stir with latest contact in heated battle for P17".
That's not even a direct knock on Hocevar, whom we're not arguing isn't talented; it's a knock on the media and their latest decision to zero in on one driver and embrace an odd obsession. At one point in Saturday's race at Richmond Raceway, the camera panned to him, running a lap down in the low 20s, battling with Kyle Larson, who was not a lap down.
We're really glad they can get their weekly soundbites from a driver with zero career wins away from drafting tracks and an average finish of 15.8, and that he's supposedly saving the sport by running into people all the time and not apologizing. That's awesome. Major kudos.
But if you're looking for a driver who can actually rival Corey Heim, it's Ty Gibbs.
They don't like each other. They never have. We've already documented how Joe Gibbs Racing had multiple chances to sign Heim but didn't, decisions believed to have been made simply to keep Ty happy (and admittedly, by association, to avoid unnecessary friction with the team). While 23XI Racing and Joe Gibbs Racing have a technical alliance, they are not the same team.
Gibbs is actually a championship contender. For all intents and purposes, if there's a driver who has a bad relationship with Heim but can actually compete with Heim, Gibbs is the guy. And at 23 years old, he has the potential to be the guy for a very long time, for just as long as Heim has the chance to be battling at the top of the sport.
As much as Heim has a chance to be a thorn in JGR's side for years to come, perhaps that has also produced the chance for NASCAR to have an actual rivalry to watch, rather than one involving a guy everybody thinks is Dale Sr. simply because he flipped someone the bird.
Being unapologetic is one thing. Being unapologetic and actually taking the fight to someone equally as unapologetic is another. And that's what the battle between Gibbs and Heim has the potential to deliver for NASCAR fans over the next decade-plus.
If you were drafting a long-term NASCAR team from scratch, starting today, Heim and Gibbs are undoubtedly both going inside the top three, and possibly the top two.
The fact that there has never been any love lost between the two of them is an added bonus, and while it's not one that anybody has really been able to focus on for the past few years, since they've been running in different series, it's one that could very well come back into the mix next year, as Heim prepares for his first full season at the sport's top level.
If Hocevar can eventually emerge as a contender as well, that wouldn't hurt matters either.
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