Dropping the Hammer: Daniel Hemric’s 9 Lives

Daniel Hemric refuses to let his career die.

And he’s doing it for his kids.

The 33-year-old driver has been around a while. His first NASCAR start was way back in 2013 at Martinsville Speedway in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series.

In the 12 years since, he’s made 324 national series starts, been called up to the NASCAR Cup Series twice, raced for seemingly half the teams in the sport and won a NASCAR Xfinity Series championship in 2021.

But before last weekend’s Truck race, the only time Hemric had ever won a NASCAR race was when he won said Xfinity championship.

I was at Phoenix Raceway that night in 2021 when Hemric clinched the Xfinity title and performed the first celebratory backflip of his NASCAR career. In the years since, it felt like another flip might not happen.

Then, last weekend, it happened. For just the second time in his NASCAR career, things actually went his way.

What better place for it to happen than at track where he got his first start?

Wait, hold that thought.

“It’s funny, I think back to 2013 getting my first Truck start here, and everybody just says, ‘Oh man, he’s a short track guy. You know he’s going to love this place,'” Hemric recalled. “I honestly didn’t dislike any other racetrack more than this place.”

Oh.

The half-mile facility “really chewed me up, spit me out,” Hemric said of NASCAR’s oldest track.

But that was before 2021. Before his time working with Dave Rogers during his Xfinity Series stint with Joe Gibbs Racing.

When the crew chief asked Hemric what his weak links were, Martinsville was Hemric’s first answer.

Rogers told the driver that after working with him, Hemric would be calling him after races to tell him “how much I now enjoy Martinsville. And that’s the first thing I did. He gave me what I wanted.”

This year marks Hemric’s first time in the Truck Series since 2018. Hemric was asked if he needed to win a race in order to validate his decision to return to the series after losing his Cup ride from 2024.

“I don’t about validating the decision,” Hemric said. “I came back here because I thought … Not I thought, I knew I could win.”

But he also did it for his family.

Hemric noted that when he reigned supreme in November 2021, his daughter Rhen was only two years old.

He wanted to make sure both her and his son Ruston had firm memories of him being successful.

“I told [McAnally-Hilgemann Racing co-owner] Bill McAnally our first time we sat down together that one of my selfish main goals was that, my wife and I have stood in victory lane together, whether people know it or not, hundreds of times throughout our lives growing up and my kids have never experienced that,” Hemric said. “So one of my reasons I want to come back here was to try to win and give them those memories.

“So tonight was a start for that.”

Of course, he got to do his backflip. He called the decision “reckless” but worth it.

“I felt a lot of energy from the crowd, and I’m guilty as anybody of feeding off that stuff,” Hemric said. “So it’s like, ‘Why not? I’ll blow a knee out here landing.'”

He’s raced with plenty of busted knees in his career.

“A lot of people don’t know I’ve had multiple knee surgeries,” Hemric admitted. “So it’s not like there isn’t some risk to me doing it. I’ve actually thought about not doing it, but like, I was fortunate to a lot of those growing up through the ranks and those times haven’t been very often in the NASCAR ranks.

“So I was gonna take advantage of it.”