Carson Hocevar has never hidden his stance on preparation. While most drivers lean on simulators to map out a weekend, he keeps circling back to seat time, arguing that nothing replaces laps on a track. It is a stance he has carried into meetings as well, pushing NASCAR to open the door for Cup drivers to run across all three national series.
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For Hocevar, the path to speed runs through the cockpit. And his approach does not stop at track time. It extends to how he learns the craft.
Where drivers like Connor Zilisch and Jesse Love study videos from past races to sharpen their skills and pick apart lines, Hocevar takes a different road. He recently shared that his performance does not hinge on SMT, the data system that has become a go-to thing in modern NASCAR garages.
“Yeah, I just really can’t take anything away from SMT. If they shut it off for everybody, I wouldn’t go any slower,” Hocevar said per Cup Scene.
The Spire Motorsports driver then went a step further, flipping the argument on its head. “But I think others would, so I think it would help me. I get the most out of watching old races or even older races, really. You just see stuff, and I just kind of compare weird things.
“I was at COTA one week, and I was comparing it to Martinsville for one corner of how I wanted my car, which sounds really weird for a lot of people that are new to our shop. That’s just kind of how I operate. I feel like I can take anything from anything,” he stated.
Hocevar’s routine leans on repetition and recall, and he usually keeps races from the late 2000s on his screen, letting them run and picking up cues along the way. “I feel like somewhere or another, I’ll learn something from something I see or watch and can attach it to today, but then you watch the current races or current cars.”
“But yeah, I just don’t get a lot from data and squiggly lines. It doesn’t really make sense to me. It never really has worked for me, but for others, it does,” the #77 driver continued.
Even inside the garage, that stance sets him apart. Daniel Suárez, his teammate, and others lean on data, building their weekends around it and treating it as a guide. Hocevar goes his own way, trusting what he sees and feels over what a graph tells him.
Hocevar’s take on whom he didn’t get along with among his teammates
At 23, Hocevar has already logged more than eight years across the ladder, with starts in ARCA, the Truck Series, the Xfinity Series, and now Cup. But his climb has come with friction. His on-track style has ruffled feathers with other drivers. And it looks like he does not usually get along with all his teammates either.
When probed about the same, he said, “I just kind of do my own thing anyway. Even if we’re not buddy-buddy, per se, I probably don’t talk to him as much as Daniel does. Like Daniel and Michael, they get along super well on the prep side because they look at a lot of data, and I look at no data. I have my own way of looking at it. I really like watching real cars go around in circles.”
Hocevar did not name names, but he spoke of the teamwork at Spire Motorsports during superspeedway races, calling it the best he has felt in terms of working with teammates on track. The difference with past stops, including his time with Niece Motorsports from 2021 to 2023 in the Truck Series, indicates a course that has probably not always run straight.
