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It’s fine to explain away all that happened at Bristol last Saturday night with a cry of “It’s Bristol, Baby!” But what happened was NASCAR trying to control a narrative and creating a villain out of the kid who didn’t want to play along.
For years, every time something happened in NASCAR that people, from drivers to fans to race teams, the go-to move was to dub NASCAR “the WWF/E of motorsports.” For a long time, I was ready to respond by asking “Would it be better if it was the NWA (or Ring of Honor, or ECW, or AWA, and now AEW) of motorsports?” However, in the last year or two, it certainly seems that indeed NASCAR is becoming the WWE of motorsports.
Just as a lengthy aside, we were already seeing major evidence of this a year ago when Denny Hamlin became NASCAR’s version of Daniel Bryan. For those not in the know, allow me to explain. In 2014, WWE fans convinced themselves that Daniel Bryan was going to win the Royal Rumble. Instead, he never appeared and Dave Batista won instead. The fans sh!t all over every part of the WWE product until management changed the storylines and added Bryan to the Wrestlemania XXX main event and had Bryan win the title. All good? Nope, turns out Bryan was injured and had to relinquish the title. That didn’t matter to the fans who were still not going to accept anything less than a lengthy Daniel Bryan World title run. When the WWE went with Roman Reigns as champion, the fans reacted negatively.
Basically, this is exactly what has happened in NASCAR. The fans, the media, the blue checkmark brigade, wanted Denny Hamlin to win the championship. (Hell, even I wanted him to win.) However, in raising a generation or two of people who have been told “You’ll get what you want or there will be consequences,” when it was Kyle Larson and not Denny Hamlin who was crowned the 2025 Cup Series Championship, all hell broke loose. The Playoffs were demonized and eliminated in favour of the return of the Chase. Right now, Denny is 1 point back behind Larson. Obviously there are still seven races left in the Chase. A lot could and will happen. But, at this point, I shudder to think what the backlash could be if Hamlin doesn’t win the championship this year. Much like the WWE fanbase, NASCAR’s online will not accept any other path but the one they will demand be taken.
Meanwhile…back to Bristol…
NASCAR, Joe Gibbs Racing, and the Busch family decided to use the Bristol Night Race as an opportunity to honour Kyle Busch. I want to stress: I have no problem with that. The Kyle Busch tributes have borne a resemblance to those for Dale Earnhardt in 2001. For the most part, these tributes have been simple and classy. In the discussion of these tributes, it was stressed that Busch loved racing at Bristol and was very successful there during his career.
As part of the tribute, Joe Gibbs Racing’s #54, driven by Ty Gibbs, was a rolling tribute to Kyle Busch and the Busch family. The livery was a collection of photos of Busch and his family and JGR even managed to have his former long-time sponsor, M&M’s, to return for this one-night-only deal. The Busch family, Samantha, Brexton and Lennix, were in attendance to talk about how much Busch loved Bristol.
(All of this combines for what I’m sure was to be a heart-warming moment…until you remember that M&M’s pulling their sponsorship out of NASCAR after over 20 years, is the reason that Kyle Busch was forced out… just in time for a full-time ride at JGR to open up for Ty Gibbs. This, of course, came a year after Busch “retired” from the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series, just as Gibbs was about to make his full-time debut in that series.)
As the pre-race ceremonies progressed, it didn’t take long for at least this viewer to wonder “What kind of emotional outpouring would there be if Ty Gibbs drove the Kyle Busch tribute car to a win at Bristol?” By the last quarter of the race, I was wondering if I was watching NASCAR take a page out of the WWE’s playbook and basically book Gibbs to get the win, no matter who else might contend for the victory.
Everyone will talk about the fight on pit road after the checkered flag but I can’t blame Blaney for being upset. It’s like the 1979 Daytona 500. Everyone will talk about “The Fight” as if it started because Cale Yarborough and Donnie Allison collided on the last lap. The fight really stemmed from Bobby Allison causing a wreck that collected Donnie and Cale earlier in the race. Cale drove mad for several hundred laps and when the wreck with Donnie took away his chance at winning the Daytona 500, he wanted to take it out on somebody. It turned out to be Bobby Allison when the older Allison arrived on the scene of the wreck after the race.
While Blaney may not have been driving around Bristol as long and as upset as Cale was, he certainly had the right to be upset. Just not completely with Hocevar. This is not to say that Gibbs was completely out of contention until NASCAR made it so. In fact, Gibbs and Blaney were battling for the lead when pit stops began with just over 100-120 laps to go. Gibbs pitted first while Blaney stayed out for several more laps. Blaney was literally coming down pit lane when…wouldn’t you know it … Gibbs’s Toyota teammate, Riley Herbst, made contact with Zane Smith and spun out. Blaney had passed the commitment cone and was penalized. It gave Gibbs the lead and forced Blaney to the back of the pack.
Carson Hocevar had reason to be upset as well. He was racing Gibbs for the lead and had taken point on the field when, on lap 444, William Byron spun to bring out a caution. Hocevar would lead the field to green…except that NASCAR announced that the the scoring loops had determined that Gibbs was still the leader. On most nights, maybe you let that go, but there just seemed to be a lot of things falling into place for Gibbs.
As it turned out, the ensuing battle between Hocevar and Gibbs would eventually give the lead and win to Team Penske’s Joey Logano. To put it in historical perspective, Gibbs and Hocevar played the role of Darrell Waltrip and Terry Labonte at the 1981 Talladega 500, and Logano being Ron Bouchard. During the post-race interview, Logano was surprised to hear a loud round of boos. He deftly deflected the boos, saying that this win was “Four the Haters.” Now before anyone thinks that last sentenced contained a typo, it was actually a nod to Logano’s ability to quickly market himself and declare himself on the verge of a FOURTH NASCAR Cup Championship.
Were people really booing Joey because they were unhappy he, in particular, had won the race? Joey does have his detractors but I think this harkens to the end of last season. The crowd was all but promised that they would get their feel-good moment. When they were denied that, they showed their displeasure.
Of course, there’s an argument to be made that, if Gibbs hadn’t tried to find a hole between Alex Bowman and Cole Custer that probably wasn’t there (a throwback to the Brad Keselowski attempt to do the same to Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson at Texas in 2014) and faded to fifth, NASCAR might have decided to have Logano fail post-race inspection. (Or maybe that’s just my conspiracy theory for the week.)
Of course, there’s also an argument to be made that the crowd might not have even noticed that Joey was being interviewed and may have been booing the fact that the Hocevar-Blaney fight on pit road had been broken up. Let’s face it: Logano winning the 2026 Bristol Night Race will be similar to Richard Petty winning the 1979 Daytona 500. “Oh Joey won? Yeah….but there was a fight!”
Getting back to the fight. It started from a clip by Hocevar on Blaney that caused the #12 Penske Ford to get in a race-ending wreck. Much like the issue between Keselowski and Hocevar during the Southern 500 a couple of weeks ago, the hit didn’t seem all that hard. It was on par with the contact between Bubba Wallace and Austin Dillon earlier in the Darlington race. It certainly was nowhere near as hard and intentional a hit as Ty Gibbs wrecked Erik Jones with at Gateway.
Just as an aside: I (sarcasm) LOVED (/sarcasm) Steve Letarte’s call of the Gibbs/Jones incident, saying that if this had been Hocevar, the analysts would have called him out on it. Initially I assumed he meant that it would be hypocritical to give Hocevar crap when he’s involved in a wreck and not say do the same to Gibbs. Instead, what Letarte meant was “We’d give Hocevar crap if he was involved…but he’s not, so let’s just forget it happened.” Seriously, it was like the Men in Black showed up with one of those memory erasing tools and just said “Yeah, it never happened!” and everyone forgot about it.
Certainly, if NASCAR was attempting to create the heart-warming moment of having Ty Gibbs pay tribute to JGR’s former driver by winning the Bristol Night Race in a car adorned with photos of Kyle Busch, they’ve been spending even more time over the last several months trying to make Carson Hocevar the biggest heel in the sport.
It’s understandable. After all, Hocevar was supposed to be, to put it into wrestling terms again, a mid-carder, someone who celebrated a Top 20 but would spend the bulk of any race just trying to stay on the lead lap. What angered NASCAR, a lot of the drivers and certainly a lot of teams, is that they watched Hocevar pass them. Aggressively perhaps but certainly heading for a Top 10 finish, one he was never supposed to be allowed to achieve.
By the way, I was going to make a wrestling reference as to what mid-80s mid-carder Hocevar might remind one of, but I just realized that I’m basically describing Danica Patrick during her career with Stewart-Haas Racing.
That leads me to the next little order of business. Hocevar isn’t driving for one of the top teams, the way Patrick was. He’s not with Gibbs or 23XI or Penske or Hendrick, although Spire does have an alliance with Hendrick Motorsports. In fact, he’s driving for a team involved in a pretty ugly-looking legal battle with Gibbs. If Gibbs has the pull that most people would suggest they have, Spire should have suffered the fate of Michael Waltrip Racing or Leavine Family Racing or Furniture Row Racing. Heck, all MWR and Furniture Row did was start to encroach JGR’s dominance as the top Toyota team. (Leavine was kicked to the curb once 23XI came along and Gibbs didn’t need them anymore.)
Suffice to say that this is one more reason why Hocevar is being painted as the ne’er-do-well of NASCAR. He’s upsetting the apple cart. He’s going places he’s been told he doesn’t belong. Most importantly, he’s disrupting the narrative. We saw that a couple of years ago with Ross Chastain who was getting closer to the front than he was supposed to, even making the Final Four one year. In doing so, he also suffered from accusations of being too aggressive and being blamed for any wreck he was anywhere near. Drivers even went to call being wrecked “Chastain’d.” I must assume that that has been replaced by being “Hocevar’d.” No matter the buzzword or hashtag, it must have become some sort of trigger point to people like Blaney when they are involved in a wreck that involves Hocevar. “I got wrecked by Hocevar. Brad threatened to pay him back. I’m going to have my say too!” Hence the fight on pit road. If Hocevar keeps hearing that everyone is out to get him, of course he’s going to be defensive when someone like Blaney approaches him.
Hence the fight after the Bristol Night Race. NASCAR of course will get a ton of mileage out of the footage to help market themselves, much like they did after the 1979 Daytona fight. “Come for the race. Stay for the fight.” A feat made even easier in 2026 with the advent of social media. Every NASCAR-related account I follow was filled with images of the fight. I think I heard most about Carson Hocevar than I did about Donald Trump or Mark Carney.
Here’s what interesting about that: There were also images of hundreds of fans swarming Hocevar’s merchandise hauler after the race. There’s video of him leaving Bristol on a motorized cart that resemble the films of the Allies entering liberated cities in 1944.
We have long heard that “NASCAR needs more characters.” They have one in Hocevar. They also got a kid with a small team, punching above his weight class. This seems like the blue collar kid that gives an “F-U” to the big money teams and says “You can’t stop me from getting to the front and contending for the win.”
They wanted to tell a story. Hocevar went against the script and gave them a story.
NASCAR wanted a villain. They got a folk hero.
