Spire Motorsports among the surprises of NASCAR season so far with Talladega up next
Despite five finishes of 30th or worst in the first eight races of the season, Carson Hocevar has avoided getting caught up in the dismal results.
It's the encouraging performance of his No. 77 Chevrolet that has the 22-year-old from Portage, Michigan, believing his team is emerging as a force in NASCAR's premier Cup Series.
'Our group is so strong,' said Hocevar, who is in his second full Cup season. 'We're so good on pit road. We're good on the racetrack. We just got to be able to take advantage of the adversity. As my dad would remind me when I was a kid racing, they are character-building moments.'
Despite the disappointments, Hocevar still is part of the best start in the six-year history of Spire Motorsports, one of the season's major surprises.
At Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Michael McDowell (a two-time Cup winner hired for 2025 by Spire) delivered the first pole in team history. Hocevar finished a career-best second at Atlanta Motor Speedway
Spire, which has yet to finish a season in the top 20 of the championship standings, has its three cars ranked between 19th and 25th in points after overhauling its roster with a host of championship veterans.
Rodney Childers, who guided Kevin Harvick to the 2014 championship and earned 40 wins as a crew chief, joined the No. 7 of Justin Haley. Dax Gerringer, formerly a lead engineer for Childers at Stewart-Haas Racing, was hired as Spire's technical director. Matt McCall, a four-time winner as a Cup crew chief, was added as director of vehicle performance.
'A lot of the impact on our program is the unsung heroes,' Hocevar said before finishing 11th and leading two laps (despite a pit stop miscue) in the April 13 race at Bristol Motor Speedway. 'It's Matt McCall, Dax and a handful of others in the competition space.'
Their mettle will be tested as Bristol marked the quarter-pole of a 36-race season that gets only more grueling.
Emerging from the Easter off-weekend, the Cup Series will return Sunday at Talladega Superspeedway for a stretch of racing on 28 consecutive weeks through the Nov. 2 season finale at Phoenix Raceway.
Denny Hamlin, who has been another 2025 surprise in ending a long winless drought with new crew chief Chris Gayle, said he understands the reason for the marathon but fears the stress.
'There is always a breaking point,' he said. 'It is harder and harder to keep people over the years. It is just generally a hard sport to be a part of because of the schedule. It is certainly not ideal.'
Here are some other surprises, good and bad, from the season so far:
Penske pain
In three championships from 2022-24, Team Penske developed a title blueprint of playing possum in the regular season before reeling off hot playoff runs by Joey Logano and Ryan Blaney.
The lack of early results from Penske's trio of drivers is befuddling this season.
Logano needed seven races before his first top 10 finish, the longest stretch for a defending Cup series champion. Blaney has led five races in his No. 12 Ford but averaged a finish of 16.7 because of mechanical failures, mediocre pit stops and crash misfortune. Austin Cindric could have won the first two races at Daytonaand Atlanta but twice got wrecked.
'Last year, we didn't run very good and then we were able to fabricate a finish somehow,' Logano said. 'This year has kind of been the opposite. You name it, and it has happened. The fact that we have speed gives me a lot of confidence that a win will be around the corner at some point.'
23XI Racing's rise
After his debut in the championship field, Tyler Reddick keeps gathering steam with top-three rankings in NASCAR's passing, defense and speed categories. Teammate Bubba Wallace, who missed the playoffs last year, has shown major gains on restarts (ranking third in the series with his No. 23 Toyota).
In its fifth year, the team co-owned by Hamlin and NBA legend Michael Jordan is on target for qualifying two title contenders despite the distractions of facing off with NASCAR in federal court for an antitrust battle that could drag through the year.
Keselowski's swoon
The preseason optimism was high for Brad Keselowski. He ended a 110-race winless streak last year and was reunited for 2025 with crew chief Jeremy Bullins, who took Keselowski to his most recent championship round appearance in 2020.
But it's been a wipeout for the No. 6 Ford driver, whose best finish is 11th. The 2012 Cup champion is ranked 31st in the standings and is off to the worst start of his 16-season career. At 41, the driver-owner of Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing could face career decisions if the trajectory continues.
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