HAMPTON, Ga. — Carson Hocevar’s week began with fresh scrutiny and ended with an unlikely soundtrack. Following another stretch in the eye of the NASCAR Cup Series storm, the Spire Motorsports driver could be heard belting out Cutting Crew tunes while leading late in the Quaker State 400 Available at Walmart, a lighthearted finish to an otherwise turbulent week.
As the field prepared for the overtime restart, Hocevar’s spotter, Tyler Green, cued up the 1980s pop-rock band’s signature hit “(I Just) Died in Your Arms” over the No. 77 radio. Hocevar couldn’t help but belly laugh before refocusing on the task at hand: trying to hold off a dominant Ryan Blaney for the win at EchoPark Speedway. Blaney eventually prevailed in NASCAR Overtime, with Hocevar eventually settling for a respectable third.
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“I just hang out and start passing them one at a time, get to the front and start laughing about it,” Hocevar said. “The guys started playing music on the radio, and I was laughing my ass off. It’s a really fun night.”
Hocevar was a contender throughout the race. After finishing sixth in the opening stage, he appeared poised to score more stage points in Stage 2 before getting caught in what his crew chief Luke Lambert described as a “bad aero situation,” causing him to tumble to 29th.
Once the final stage began, however, Hocevar quickly soared up the leaderboard.
“He has got a knack for it. He studies it a lot,” Lambert told NASCAR.com of Hocevar’s ability at drafting tracks. “He has a natural talent and is able to read situations at a little bit higher level than most guys. There’s other guys that can do it, but it’s a small group that can operate that he’s able to operate here. This track, in particular, has a good balance of driving the car really hard and keeping the intensity level up for a long period of time. It suits him.”
Coming to the overtime restart, Hocevar controlled the field with Tyler Reddick in tow behind him on the outside line. The inside lane was led by Blaney, who led 171 laps — the most in a drafting race since Richard Petty paced the field for 184 laps in the 1964 Daytona 500 — and won the first two stages. Behind him was his ally, Bubba Wallace.
A push from Reddick down the backstretch gave Hocevar the lead at the white-flag lap. But the Nos. 12 and 23 cars got reconnected down the frontstretch, with Blaney going wide around the No. 77 Chevrolet. Down the backstretch, Wallace swooped below the yellow line — which ultimately resulted in a penalty — and Christopher Bell gave Blaney one final push to propel him to the checkered flag.
Hocevar crossed the start/finish line in fourth during the wee hours of Monday morning but was later credited with a podium effort, with Wallace getting bumped to the final car on the lead lap in 29th.
Hocevar was having flashbacks to the spring 2025 race in the Atlanta suburb, another thrilling three-wide finish that he barely lost to Bell.
“I could block the second car; it was way too big of a run to block the first guy,” Hocevar said. “I got three-wide somewhere, and you are trying to figure out where you’re going to end up based on the pusher behind me — and it’s all Toyotas. I was like, ‘[Expletive], they are not pushing me.’ It was fun, a good time. We were up front in contention for another win.”
MORE: Cup Series standings | Cup Series schedule
Hocevar has been a threat at all four drafting tracks thus far in 2026. He has led parts of the final lap in three of the four to date, scoring his first Cup victory in late April at Talladega Superspeedway.
“I’m super confident in the moves I make,” Hocevar said of his superspeedway success.
The 39-point effort elevated Hocevar to eighth in the regular-season standings, leapfrogging Chase Briscoe with six races remaining before The Chase.