Corey Day’s primary goals entering 2026? Win a race and make The Chase.
Those goals were a perfect baseline, especially for a 20-year-old driver heading into his first full-time season in the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series. Given his roots in micro sprints, sprint cars and dirt bikes rather than stock cars, expectations were naturally grounded.
Fast forward to October, the No. 17 Hendrick Motorsports pilot’s expectations have soared. Day has captured four wins, 11 top fives, 20 top 10s and led 394 laps through 30 races. As a bona fide postseason driver, the opportunity to claim a championship crown is possible.
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“It’s pretty cool to look back on, for sure,” Day told NASCAR.com. “To think, at the beginning of the year, I obviously hadn’t won anything yet and was still doing a lot of learning and struggling to kind of figure this all out, it’s pretty cool to look back. It’s been eight months, or however long it’s been, and yeah, we got four wins, and we’re in the hunt for a championship.”
An 11-race cup of coffee during the 2025 O’Reilly campaign gave Day experience at a range of track types, including short tracks and road courses. That experience has paid dividends, with Day’s first career O’Reilly win coming at Talladega Superspeedway in April. A Dover Motor Speedway victory in May, plus back-to-back Chase wins at Las Vegas Motor Speedway and Charlotte Motor Speedway, has rounded out the Victory Lane portfolio.
History has even been made. Day became the first Hendrick driver to win consecutive O’Reilly races since Kyle Busch in 2004. If Day wins a fifth race, he will join Busch, Greg Biffle and Carl Edwards as drivers to win exactly five O’Reilly races in their first full-time O’Reilly season — tied for third most all time.
“That’s super cool,” Day said. “… I guess seven is possible now, with three left? That would be obviously awesome. But you know, if we end the season with only four, I’d still be super happy with that, too.”
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Adam Wall, crew chief of the No. 17, developed a passion for racing at a young age, with that interest culminating in a motorsports engineering degree from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2011. After joining Hendrick Motorsports, the 37-year-old Wall worked his way up the ranks, from sweeping floors in the chassis shop to joining Hendrick and the No. 17 camp in 2025 following a stint calling shots at JR Motorsports.
“We went from our 11 races last year, getting the top five or so, running 10th to 12th, to then kind of start of this year, have our string of top 10s and solid performances, and then you’re leading laps when you get to Vegas, and then you’re leading, winning a stage when you get to Martinsville the week after that,” Wall told NASCAR.com. “It was just a lot of development really quickly, and I think we just continue to see that.
“I think that wins at Vegas and Charlotte translate into one of our weaker on-paper Chase tracks in Phoenix. I think that was a really strong Phoenix race for what we’ve put out there at Phoenix the previous two times we’ve been there with Corey. So I think just that continued development, and I don’t think we’ve seen the ceiling of that yet. I think it just continues to grow every week we go to the track.”
There have still been growing pains. He had back-to-back incidents in the season’s early moments at EchoPark Speedway with Justin Allgaier and Carson Kvapil and Circuit of The Americas with Connor Zilisch. In the opening Chase races, skirmishes with William Sawalich at Darlington Raceway and World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway resulted in a hauler visit at Bristol Motor Speedway.
“None of them have been intentional by any means. They just all showed my inexperience in stock-car racing,” Day said. “I think overall, there’s been a ton to learn from each and every one of them. Obviously, this last one wasn’t ideal, being in The Chase. I look back on it now with where we’re at in points, and yeah, you look back on it, and things could look a whole lot different if that doesn’t happen and we have a good run in St. Louis. I think there’s a lot to learn from each and every one of them, and I definitely have, as my results have shown and my race craft has shown, this last half of the season.”
“I think just him to say that right there is being willing to learn from each of these events,” Wall said. “I mean, no, it’s not what we want for The Chase. It’s not how we want to start the first and second races of The Chase, right? But to still have a shot at it, and for him to realize that now, at this point, still with three races to go, I think as long as his mindset is in the big picture more than it was maybe at those times, that’s all I can ask out of those experiences.”
After entering The Chase presented by Mobil 1 as the No. 7 seed, Day now sits third in the table, 39 points behind Chase leader Jesse Love. According to Wall, the ability to maneuver and find clean air has helped Day excel. From his time with the No. 5 team in the NASCAR Cup Series from 2021-2023, Wall believes Day keeps a straightforward approach, an aspect similar to Kyle Larson.
“Just kind of less analytical approach maybe than others, and more of a clean-slate mindset going into the weekend,” Wall said. “Just not relying so much on what has worked in the past and what this or that may look like, even into qualifying lines or any of that. More of a in-the-moment approach to things that I think is healthy in a lot of the places we go and has really paid off.”
Sticking to that less-analytical approach, Day – who signed a long-term extension with Hendrick Motorsports and will also make his Cup debut next season – is focused on 2026. His comfort level has grown. His progression has only increased, with stints of getting caught off guard becoming less frequent than during his summer stretch.
The mentality remains simple.
“I still go out there every weekend with a mindset to learn,” Day said. “Now I know it’s a lot more possible to win each time I’m out there than it was to start the season, and I don’t by any means go out there thinking that I can’t win. I think if you go out on the track as a race car driver with the mindset that you can’t win, it’s pretty foolish of you. I know that each and every time we’re out there, it could be our day, which is different than even over the summer. I obviously wanted to win at the start of this year, but I had a long road ahead of me. So yeah, now I think I’m more confident in my ability. I think our team’s operating at a high level, so I don’t think the mindset has changed a ton. But I’d say maybe we expect a little more than we did at the beginning of the year.”
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Three Chase races remain, with Talladega – the site of Day’s first win – on Saturday (3:30 p.m. ET, The CW, ESPN Unlimited, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio). Eagerness to clinch a title in Hendrick’s first full-time O’Reilly season since 2006 is evident.
“This company’s got a huge history, obviously, on the Cup side,” Wall said. “It’s been a while on the O’Reilly side since they’ve been there, but when they were there full time, they always had big performances with [Brian] Vickers and Kyle Busch and all that. So to be back full-time racing under this umbrella and have a shot at it, it would mean a ton for me to bring one home.”
Win a race? Check. Make The Chase? Accomplished.
The chance to achieve a more ambitious goal is within reach.
“To be a champion is obviously something you dream of for your whole life when this is what you want to do and being a race car driver, so yeah, it would be crazy, to tell you the truth,” Day said. “I really don’t even know how I would feel or react to it because last year I didn’t even know if I was gonna make it as a stock-car driver. I was not doing anything impressive and struggling … to sit here a year later, and that’s even in the conversation, is crazy. So we do everything we can to try and make it happen, that’s for sure.”