NASCAR insiders react to Carson Hocevar's eventful day at Atlanta Motor Speedway

Carson Hocevar had an eventful day at the Ambetter Health 400 at the Atlanta Motor Speedway on Sunday. And that might be putting it mildly.

From an early interaction that left Kyle Busch flipping him off and vowing to wreck him, to a late-race bump that spun out Ryan Blaney, finally to a second-place finish, Hocevar ran the gamut.

And it left NASCAR insiders wondering what to make of it.

Following the race, both Ross Chastain and Ryan Blaney confronted Carson Hocevar on the infield. Neither were happy with his racing.

“It’s just young driver, aggressive, seems to kind of keep making the same kind of mistakes,” The Athletic’s Jordan Bianchi said on The Teardown podcast. “I don’t even want to say they’re mistakes, it depends on your perspective, right? He’s a very aggressive driver who doesn’t seem to really back off at times.”

That aggression can get Carson Hocevar into trouble.

But Bianchi argued that it’s not necessarily something that’s new to NASCAR. He’s far from the first young driver to bully his way into the Cup Series and ruffle some feathers.

“And part of that is just we’ve seen this all the time from young drivers,” Bianchi said. “We saw it with Chastain a few years ago. You’re going to rub people the wrong way, that’s part of this process. And Blaney said the same thing, he’s a young driver, he’s going for it. And this is kind of who Carson Hocevar is, going back to the Truck Series. And he hasn’t really evolved too much from that. There’s almost like a level of this is who he is, he isn’t really going to change, maybe we need to try to get him to change.”

It’s one thing for the drivers to be upset with Carson Hocevar. But is he problematic for the fans too? That’s the question Bianchi’s cohost on The Teardown, Jeff Gluck, suggested is the real one.

“Everybody gets mad at these people and they get this reputation,” Gluck said. “OK, we’re not in the car so we don’t care. We shouldn’t care. Is it such a bad thing the way Carson Hocevar races? I don’t see him wrecking anybody really.

“Today, he was making some — I was watching his in-car camera, right? It was so fun. He’s making slicing, dicing moves. He is boldly, aggressively going to the front. He is, I guess he’s not following sort of the etiquette. He’s probably not working with people very well at all. He’s very much on his own. But like what do we care? That’s the show.”

Gluck doubled down on the take that Carson Hocevar is entertaining for viewers.

“Everybody’s like, ‘Oh Hocevar, oh my gosh, this guy, he’s a menace, he’s such a menace,'” Gluck said. “OK, well like I could see if I was a driver I could feel that way, probably. But seems pretty entertaining to me.

“I kind of want guys to race like that. He doesn’t care if he’s making friends. He doesn’t care if he ruffles feathers. He’s like, ‘Oh, sorry, I finished second.’ Eventually I’m sure it’ll get beaten out of him, just like it seems to have for Chastain or anybody else. Maybe.”