Corey Day’s debut on intermediate tracks at Kansas Speedway is still memorable almost a year later.
During an ARCA Menards Series race, most might recall his run-in with Andy Jankowiak on the final lap battling for second, where Day got loose between Jankowiak and Connor Zilisch and sent the No. 73 into the wall. Day finished fourth and Jankowiak fell back to seventh.
“We’re getting run over by Hendrick Motorsports cars,” Jankowiak said after confronting Day post-race.
Lost in the shuffle is that with a third of the race to go, Day was challenging Tanner Gray for the lead in his first asphalt race on a track bigger than half-a-mile. Day slides up into Gray, gets totally sideways and somehow saves it. That’s how close the sprint car phenom following in the footsteps of Kyle Larson was to winning his first intermediate race.
It’s the closest he’s been in his year of trials and tribulations since.
Day failed to garner a top 15 in four NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series races with McAnally-Hilgemann Racing. He got caught up in a wreck during his superspeedway debut at Daytona International Speedway in ARCA this past February. His five starts with Spire Motorsports in the Trucks prior to this past weekend only yielded two 15th-place finishes and his Xfinity Series debut at Martinsville Speedway — like many others that day — was marred by accidents en route to a 21st-place finish.
At Texas Motor Speedway, his 16th-place run included an accident that collected Sheldon Creed and ended his race. This, along with his previous unremarkable runs, brought into question if the Corey Day experiment by Hendrick Motorsports was going to wind up being just that: An experiment.
This past weekend at Nashville Superspeedway, Day added some new data points that caught people by surprise.
Starting up front, Day actually led the field early in stage one, passing Corey Heim and Spire teammate Rajah Caruth on the outside entering turn 3. He faded back into the top five where he hung out for most of the day.
Spire clearly had speed — Caruth went on to win the race — and Day finally wound up where he should have been. A top-five truck wound up fifth without incident in just his 17th national series start.
“I’m usually not this happy to run fifth but it was a hard-earned fifth for sure,” Day told Frontstretch after the Truck race. “I owe it to these No. 7 guys to get them a good finish. We’ve had times where we’ve been fast and either I’ve messed up or circumstances haven’t gone our way. It feels good to bring home a top five with a clean truck too.”
The Xfinity race on Saturday is where Day had to deal with the most chaos — boy, what a difference a few years makes — in his third start in the series.
Unlike the Truck race, Day had plenty to overcome. After starting in the middle of the pack, Day somehow avoided disaster with a spin in turn 2 to end stage one. At the end of stage two, Day was in 26th place.
Then came the final stage, where Day was caught up right in the middle of the restart stackup that took out the likes of Christian Eckes (whose season from hell continues), Ryan Ellis and others.
With a bit of pit strategy, Day found himself 16th on a restart with 48 laps to go and the rookie kept marching forward to an 11th-place finish.
“It’s good to put one together,” Day said after the Xfinity race. “I got into it a little bit on the front straightaway when everyone got stacked on that start. Other than that, it was a really clean race.”
Was Nashville the start of Day taking the next step in his NASCAR career or was it just a one-off? Time will tell, but there’s one thing that became clear in his performances this past weekend: He’s growing.
Taking your lumps as a racecar driver is hard, and oftentimes comes with painful, costly outcomes. There’s nobody that might know that better this past month than Kyle Larson after his attempt at the Memorial Day double down in disaster. Larson is one of the key players in getting Day into NASCAR having raced him in the High Limit Racing Series.
When Day was still struggling back in early spring, Larson wasn’t worried. If anything, he made it sound like a necessity.
“It’s good for a young guy who’s just dominated in everything he’s ever driven to be humbled,” Larson said after winning at Bristol Motor Speedway in April. “Even with the rough races and finishes, he’s going to come out the other side a much better, more well-rounded, mentally tough racecar driver than he was.”
He’s already looking like a better asphalt driver than he did last fall. With seven more Xfinity starts this season, who knows where Day could wind up skill wise before he hits 20.
James Krause joined Frontstretch in March 2024 as a contributor. Krause was born and raised in Illinois and graduated from Northern Illinois University. He currently works in La Crosse, Wisconsin as a local sports reporter, including local short track racing. Outside of racing, Krause loves to keep up with football, music, anime and video games.