Holding A Pretty Wheel: NASCAR Drivers Need to Be Relatable, Not Robots

Carson Hocevar’s first career NASCAR Cup Series win came on Sunday (April 26) at Talladega Superspeedway, holding off Chris Buescher as cars crashed in their wake, and the fans in attendance loved it. They loved it even more when Hocevar drove his car up the frontstretch while sitting on the window ledge saluting the crowd, nosed into the outside wall, and lit up the tires before getting out of the car and retrieving the checkered flag. Hocevar then handed it off to a young fan before heading to victory lane to celebrate with his team.

It was one of the most enthusiastic crowd reactions in recent memory. Hocevar was living in the moment and the fans were along for the ride. It was a celebration that the sport desperately needed, and despite the danger of Hocevar’s stunt, NASCAR’s reaction was, essentially, “go for it.”

Hocevar has matured on track this year, toning down his aggression just enough not to be his own worst enemy. He’s had the speed to run up front and he does not shy away from going door-to-door with the sport’s veterans. He has also been outgoing and honest out of the racecar, and his sponsors and team have mostly let him be himself.

On Sunday, he became a 23-year-old kid who realized a lifelong dream. And he acted like it. Hopefully, he, or his team Spire Motorsports, will rethink the window stunt in the future. As wildly spontaneous as it was, it was also incredibly dangerous, especially without a helmet, and could have ended in tragedy.

That’s not how this story should end. Not when it’s just getting started.

Hopefully, NASCAR will see the popularity of Hocevar’s win and celebration and allow more of it. Not necessarily death-defying helmetless celebrations, but exuberance and purity of emotions. Even more so, sponsors and team public relations departments should be embracing what transpired Sunday.

The fans loved it because it was real. Hocevar doesn’t come across like so many of his peers: polished to a fault, conscious of every word and keeping their personalities under wraps for fear of saying the wrong thing. Fans want to feel like the drivers are people they can relate to. They want people they can sit down and have a beer and talk racing with, not corporate spokespeople.

NASCAR, teams and sponsors should be promoting their drivers as people fans want to root for. As people who are authentic and relatable and, yes, even fallible. When fans refer to drivers as “vanilla,” that’s not a compliment. 

Maybe it’s time for NASCAR, and more importantly the sponsors, to open their eyes.

An incident that has resonated with me years later was when, several years ago, Jimmie Johnson was injured in the offseason falling off the roof of a golf cart, where he was “surfing” while playing around with friends. Johnson fractured his wrist which, while not ideal, was the result of him being an authentic human caught in a moment of youthful silliness. 

But his PR machine promptly stifled him after the incident. The official statement at the time was that Johnson fell “out of” the golf cart, which really just sounded ridiculous and made Johnson look really stupid. Not that surfing on top of the cart was exactly an act of intellectual prowess, but it was a (slightly overgrown) kid being a kid.

Imagine if his team let him run with it? Johnson was labeled as vanilla during his NASCAR career not because he actually was but because his sponsors wanted him to be. Don’t ruffle feathers. Say the right things, thank NASCAR, thank God and say it was a great day for the guys was the company mentality for him at Hendrick Motorsports. Week after week after week…

But Johnson wasn’t like that. He and his friends, several of whom were also in high-profile rides, were a little wild, though mostly harmless, and made some memories that fans, had they known about them, could probably easily relate to. Had he been allowed to be human, he’d have been a fan favorite even with fans who primarily had another favorite driver. 

The reason it seems like the drivers in the early days seemed a lot wilder and a lot more like the average fan weren’t necessarily because they were. A lot of the old stories end up with somebody naked, a car in a swimming pool, and a couple of rubber snakes for good measure.

Somewhere along the line over the past two decades, the stories dried up. Drivers became insulated in motorhomes at the track, and what they did during the week was generally allowed but not talked about. And the more the sponsors told them what to say and where to stand and what to do, the more the fans felt disinterested.

In the late 1990s, when NASCAR was booming, NASCAR and sponsors used their drivers in ad campaigns, which, while often unrealistic (nobody wears Octane 93 on a date), put the drivers out there in ways that made fans feel like they knew them. They felt like family, like community. By the 2000s, that was already going away.

So, it’s long past time to bring back marketing centered on the drivers and their personalities. It’s past time for the PR machine to realize that a slip of the tongue or an embarrassing moment makes fans like the driver more, not less. Because humans make mistakes and have a sense of humor and sometimes have a regrettable “hey y’all, watch this!” moment that they remember years later.

“Hey man, remember that time you were surfing on the golf cart and fell off and broke your arm?” sounds a lot more fun than, “What about that time where we all had matching ties and learned about marketing metrics?”

NASCAR allowing Hocevar to be a 23-year-old kid caught in the biggest moment of his life to date without reprimand was absolutely the right call. (Maybe a private conversation about how he could have broken a lot more than his arm was called for later, but in the moment? Let it be.)

Spire and the No. 77 sponsors have also consistently let Hocevar show his personality. Yes, sometimes he says something that grates on some people. He also says and does things that remind fans of a time when drivers were allowed to be human. 

Fans love a first-time winner, but that wasn’t the only, or even the biggest reason that the crowd went wild celebrating Hocevar’s win and broke Lionel Racing’s website trying to preorder diecasts of the No. 77. They went wild because for the first time in a long time, they could relate to the driver. 

In the words of the Mandalorian, this is the way.