It’s been a season of seconds for Carson Hocevar.
After recording a career-best finish of second during the last Camping World Truck Series season, he’s replicated that three different times this year, coming close to a victory numerous times, but still yet to claim his first career checkered flag.
The 19-year-old Niece Motorsports driver’s roller-coaster season has also featured an injury, as a late crash at World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway sent the No. 42 spinning and directly into the path of Tyler Hill‘s No. 56. The impact left Hocevar with a broken ankle, but that didn’t stop him from coming back one week later on crutches to win the pole at Sonoma Raceway before exiting the truck early in the race.
More recently, the 6’4″ driver gambled late at Kansas Speedway in a last-ditch effort to make the next round of the playoffs, his second postseason berth in as many years, but ultimately fell just short. Hocevar has also launched a YouTube channel and continues his pre-race hat gimmick, featuring everything from a “Top Gun: Maverick” helmet to a “Vote for Pedro” trucker hat to a Gumby bucket hat.
Frontstretch caught up with Hocevar at Richmond Raceway in mid-August, as well as ahead of the early-October race at Talladega Superspeedway, discussing his sophomore full-time season, making the playoffs two years in a row and several close-but-no-cigar moments in 2022. He doesn’t have anything locked down for 2023 (he’s “working on it,” but does have several more shots at his first Truck Series win this year.
Adam Cheek, Frontstretch: How was your playoff approach different this season, a career year for you, as compared to 2021?
Hocevar: There wasn’t a lot of pressure. In my opinion, you’re either good enough or you’re not — you can’t pinpoint certain moments, either it works out for you or not. [At] Kansas, we weren’t very fast, we weren’t very quick. Our trucks those three weeks were not very good; honestly, our speed was off. If you’re going to dance around the deal and say, ‘oh, we ran decent’ — no, you point out the problem, you’re honest about it and you fix the problem.
We improved and we took a 17th-place racecar, a 15th-place racecar [at Kansas] and finished second with it and had a shot to win. In one scenario, I don’t lose four seconds and we win the race and we’re in the [Round of 8]. […] We did everything we could on our last-ditch effort, and it just didn’t work out. We…
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