2024 NASCAR Cup Series Rookie of the Year, Carson Hocevar has a growing stock like no other. In his first year driving the #77 Spire Chevy full-time, the 21-year-old Michigan native outperformed all his teammates. And that’s not all. Hocevar finished 21st in the drivers’ standings, leaving his closest ROTY rival, Josh Berry, a jaw-dropping 107 points behind. 

An alumnus of the inaugural class of the Drivers Edge Development program, Hocevar is one of the brightest rising stars under the Chevy banner. However, Spire Motorsports’ lower-tier partnership with the Bowtie brand could become a big roadblock to their #77 driver’s progress in the long run. Sure, they have built powerful alliances with Tier-One organizations like Trackhouse Racing and Hendrick Motorsports. But as we look toward 2025, the big question remains. Will these partnerships finally deliver the results Spire has been chasing for so long?

Can Spire’s reduced Chevy support keep up with Carson Hocevar?

It’s been said multiple times. Justin Haley’s Daytona win in the #77 Spire car happened half a decade ago. In 2025, he will be the driver for their #7 team operations replacing Corey LaJoie. The still-relatively new race team will receive some much-needed veteran leadership next year with Michael McDowell’s switch from Front Row Motorsports. But there’s a big problem plaguing Jeff Dickerson and TJ Puchyr’s organization.

As Hocevar told Jeff Gluck in a recent interview for The Athletic, “We’re not a key partner (for Chevrolet). We don’t get all the bells and whistles when we walk into that building. We know that… But he clears any additional doubts. That hasn’t even in the slightest bit stopped Hocevar from growing in the nascent of his premier-tier NASCAR career. In his own words, “Now I’m to the point where I’m learning how to race a Cup car, not drive it. It’s more about racing the field. It’s racing in dirty air, it’s restarts. For me, the sim now is 90 percent about developing our race cars. My crew chief and our engineers get a lot of value in it.” 

“At Phoenix, we showed up exactly how we left the simulator,” asserted Hocevar. “I don’t think we made one single change — and we ran top 10, top 15 all d

ay.” When the dust settled in Arizona after the championship race, the Portage-born driver left with an 18th-place finish. He wasn’t contending for the championship. In all fairness, Hocevar was some ways off from making the Playoffs in 2024. With how fast he’s been developing, it’s only a matter of time before he puts himself in all the positive discussions.

His aggressive on-track advances are only a reflection of his childhood promises to himself of racing the top drivers in the sport. But Hocevar is aware of the limits, as he explained to Steven Taranto of CBS Sports. “It’s just being able to balance that more. They’ve got to get comfortable around me too. And I feel like I have the respect of others, but it’s a different type of respect.”

Regardless, there have been talks of Chevy elevating their partnership with Spire to a tier-one alliance in the future. Veteran spotter Brett Griffin, who worked with Spire’s new #7 driver, Justin Haley in the past, stated on an earlier episode of the Door Bumper Clear podcast that “there is a rumor that Spire is in a lot of talks with Chevrolet to become a tier-one team, basically a mini-Hendrick–which is a huge deal if Spire gets that and makes that happen.”

But as of now, nothing is sure. And it certainly looks like Spire will move into the 2025 season, with a refreshed driver lineup, and alliances with Trackhouse Racing and HMS. Then again, anything can happen in the off-season. And Carson Hocevar, who’s got a new toy to tinker with at the Spire Motorsports shop, is the best example of that notion.

New toys, and new goals in the off-season

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In his interview with Steven Taranto, the soon-to-be sophomore-year driver revealed that he’s finally getting hands-on experience building a race car by himself, for the first time. There appears to be a brand new Late Model at the Spire Motorsports workshop that Hocevar is working on. “It’s gonna be me and Jeff Dickerson’s toy in the shop to go play with,” he noted. This off-season project is supposed to be a way for the employees at Spire to have some fun, letting go of all external expectations.

Hocevar elaborated, “He reminds us that it’s good to have distractions. This Sunday stuff can be difficult. It can be stressful and everything, and he’s so good with people and managing his race team and his employees. This is gonna be how we have zero expectations… He knows we’re gonna have expectations to make the playoffs. And that’s gonna be very difficult … so if we fall short of our goal, he still wants us to be able to have fun and have something that we can build and have no expectations.”

But it seems the young gun has additional motives with this brand new Late Model at Spire. “There’s nothing more I want to do than drive race cars. So, once we get it built then we can go racing with it,” concluded Hocevar. That being said, this seems to be a win-win situation for the 21-year-old racer. Here’s to hoping all of it can help him solidify his name as one of the top Chevy prospects currently racing in NASCAR.