NASCAR CUP SERIES DOVER MOTOR SPEEDWAY TEAM CHEVY DRIVER QUOTES MAY 15, 2026 |
Carson Hocevar, driver of the No. 77 Spire Motorsports Chevrolet, met with the media in advance of running double duty in the NASCAR Cup and Craftsman Truck Series at Dover Motor Speedway. | MEDIA RESOURCES: Photo Gallery | Race AdvancesChevrolet Newsroom |
NASCAR CUP SERIESDOVER MOTOR SPEEDWAYTEAM CHEVY DRIVER QUOTESMAY 15, 2026 |
Carson Hocevar, driver of the No. 77 Spire Motorsports Chevrolet, met with the media in advance of running double duty in the NASCAR Cup and Craftsman Truck Series at Dover Motor Speedway. | MEDIA RESOURCES: Photo Gallery | Race AdvancesChevrolet Newsroom |
Media Availability Quotes: I was just curious about your Twitch stuff lately. Since the win, have you noticed any increase in the amount of people on your streams, or can you see an uptick in the amount of interaction you’re getting just even the last month or so?“Yeah, I have. I think I average a few hundred more viewers. Every post is up. The truck win, alone, on Instagram almost got like a million interactions. But yeah, I’ve definitely seen an uptick for sure, on all platforms really, which is obviously good for everybody. But yeah, I still get people that chat the first time because it kind of says it’s their first time chat. And they’re still like, congrats on Talladega. I was like, man, it’s kind of wild. It’s been like three weeks or whatever already. But yeah, there’s been growth of it, for sure.” At this point, how much of it is you’re just going on there to have fun, versus like, hey, I’m really trying to actively grow my brain to be intentional about it and talk to people? Where’s the balance there?“I do enjoy it. I don’t have my property done yet. I want to drive cars, race with my friends and enjoy it. I can only do that online right now, like Monday through Friday. So yeah, I just enjoy streaming. Before when I clicked the Live button, if I wasn’t racing, the viewers would drop a lot. But now, I can just sit there with my webcam on and yap about food or whatever I want to talk about. There’s like probably 1,500 people on Twitch and there’s probably 2,000 on TikTok. I found the mod on some game that I can run Cleetus’s racetrack. I have someone I know that’s creating Crown Vic with nitrous, so we’re going to race that. We have other stuff we’re going to do. But we’re all just reminding ourselves of what we used to do eight years ago in COVID times… we find all these weird games and race, and there’s a ton of people watching. So yeah, I kind of use a collective ‘we’ because a lot of my friends, they do content creation and everything. We enjoy when the numbers are higher, obviously. But honestly, we’re just realizing that it’s not going to really drop, and the more fun we have, we tend to see it go up. So yeah, it just makes us all really excited for when I can start doing stuff away from my desk and everything. I think that’s how you grow everything nowadays.” I know you were at Indianapolis Motor Speedway this week. When I was covering the F1 Miami race, people were talking about you there. How much from inside the industry has your victory at Talladega really something that you’ve felt?“Yeah, I mean, I just don’t know how many normal winners get congratulated on pulling off a celebration rather than just the win. I got it today at the airport. They handed me something to sign, and they’re just like, man, I love the celebration. They’re not saying, congrats on the win or anything. It’s just like, man, I love that celebration and everything. I walked around Indianapolis and everybody kind of said the same thing. When I was at the Met Gala, I got asked how many people knew who I was. I was like, I honestly don’t think a lot of them really knew that I was a NASCAR driver. They just knew that they saw me on their phone and they recognized me from Talladega. They just happened to see it on their feed. So I think that’s the biggest thing, the algorithm now is kind of where you get every source of news and everything, right? So if it crosses everybody’s algorithm, they’ll see it at some point and have a little bit of recognizability. So yeah, I think that’s been the most interesting part for me is realizing how many people at least saw it. When they’d see me before, it used to be just like, oh, he drives the Chili’s car. Now it’s like, oh, he rode on the door at Talladega. So yeah, it’s been very fascinating.” I wanted to ask you about coming here for the All-Star Race. I’m assuming that the momentum that you’re feeling, both the team doing so well but yourself, this is a great opportunity for you to become an All-Star Race winner. Could you just kind of talk about your thoughts on Dover and this race and kind of the ride you guys are on right now?“Yeah, for us, the places that you have to keep the throttle down tend to be good for us. This package has been good. Darlington’s so different, but we finished fourth. There were some others that we ran pretty decent with this package, as well. So I feel good about it. To come to a track with where we’re at and how we’ve been doing, we’re pretty confident. And for the race tracks we’re going to after this, we feel really good about them, so we’re just excited to kind of get this one going. There’s not points on the line that we’re worried about. You’re just worried about if you get a million bucks or not. We’re going to just try and swing for the fences and enjoy it.” The All-Star Race weekend, everybody always talks about location, the format and stuff. So I’m just curious — One, where would you like to see the All-Star Race, kind of be at in terms of tracks? And two, do you have a format that you’d like?“Bowman Gray would be really fun. I think that’d be super cool for the All-Star Race. It’d be a little warmer, too, than the Clash. But that’d be my vote of places that doesn’t have a points race right now. I don’t know the best format. I am going to miss the fact that the Open doesn’t really exist right now, just for the fact of I was excited to watch it and not be in it. I’ve been in it the last two years, and I was like, man, I get the satisfactory of being able to watch the Open. And I’m like, dang it, I don’t even get that satisfaction of being an All-Star… they’re going be racing with me (laughs). But it’ll feel good when those cars get eliminated at least and we get to stay out there. But it’s something different. I think it would be kind of funny — joked about it, of something like an Australian pursuit-style, where you take qualifying, flip it backwards, invert the whole field, and if you get passed, you’re done. We did that at Kalamazoo Speedway, and it was maybe one of the most fun races I’ve watched. Or they had to do a drive-thru and get to come back out, and they were well behind, so you get the advantage of being up front. But if you’re out back, you’re going to struggle. They would basically, every five laps, if you lost a position, you got either eliminated or you had to do a drive-thru. I think that would be really interesting. It would probably be making it more complicated for the fans, which we don’t obviously want to do. But I think it’d be very interesting. I know the Stoops Pursuit at the BC39 was maybe one of the greatest races we’ve ever seen and they used that format.” |