BROOKLYN, Mich. — With the laps ticking down in Sunday’s (June 8) Firekeepers Casino 400 at Michigan International Speedway, Carson Hocevar — the 22-year-old from nearby Portage, Mich. — had the lead and was looking to score his first NASCAR Cup Series win in front of the home crowd.
All the frontrunners pitted for fuel for the final time on lap 147. It was going to take an economy run to reach lap 200, however, and as the car leading the pack, Hocevar was estimated to be four laps short of fuel to make it to the finish.
The No. 77 Spire Motorsports team had two options: drop down the running order and start saving or run full throttle in the lead and hope for a caution to make it home.
They ultimately chose the latter.
“If you’re going to do the whole get back in line and save, you need to do that the whole start,” Hocevar said. “You can’t run wide open for the first 20 laps and think, ‘OK, now we’re going to save.’ We’ve already been banking on a yellow, let’s not change the game plan. It’s hard to get the lead.”
In the event that a caution never came out, Hocevar started saving fuel here and there in the lead in order to maximize his finish.
“It was going to be near impossible to save four laps around this place for how fast we were going, so you kind of knew that,” Hocevar explained. “But you wanted to save a little bit. The only reason we’re saving — it wasn’t to save to make it, it was obviously to save to just try and keep our pit stop short because we needed that yellow. So if the yellow came out, we needed the best opportunity we could.”
But that strategy proved to be all for naught, as Hocevar suffered a flat left rear tire while leading with 18 laps to go.
“Maybe [had warning] like a half a lap earlier, but I’m obviously really thankful it happened down the backstretch off [turn] 2 because I had a moment in the late exit in 2, and I’m like, ‘that’s not right,'” Hocevar recalled.
Hocevar nursed the No. 77 car to pit road, and a day that could’ve ended in career win number one instead ended with a disappointing 29th-place result off the lead lap.
We’ll never know if Hocevar would’ve had the fuel to make it to the finish in a race that went green to the end, but the flat tire robbed him of the chance.
“I’m just thinking at the task at hand, and I thought we did everything right, that we never lost the lead by our own doing,” Hocevar said. “We lost it by a tire going away.”
Michigan marked the third consecutive Cup race where Hocevar showed race-winning speed. The final results aren’t showing it, but he only continues to improve each week in his sophomore Cup campaign.
“Probably doubled, if not tripled, my laps led in my whole [Cup] career,” Hocevar said. “But it was just fun and great to take a car that wasn’t overly great and make it to where it was really, really good that it could be up front and run 60% throttle down the straightaway, 40% throttle at times and still hold on to the lead. I think takes a winning caliber team, is when you don’t start with the best car and can make it the best.”
Hocevar’s first Cup victory looks to be a matter of “when” and not “if.” All he can do is move on to the next race and keep putting himself in a position to capitalize.
“We just got to continue to just keep doing what we’re doing, believe in ourselves,” Hocevar said. “We’ve built four weeks in a row here at this mile-and-a-half stretch that I thought we’d be really good.
“I think on raw speed, if everything goes right, we’re like fourth at worst at these last four tracks. We just got to continue what we’re doing more than anything. We don’t have to get it; we got to just continue to get a little bit better at a time.”
Stephen Stumpf is the NASCAR Content Director for Frontstretch and is a three-year veteran of the site. His weekly column is “Stat Sheet,” and he formerly wrote "4 Burning Questions" for three years. He also writes commentaries, contributes to podcasts, edits articles and is frequently at the track for on-site coverage.
Find Stephen on Twitter @stephen_stumpf