Kevin Harvick offers advice to Carson Hocevar over Ricky Stenhouse Jr. incident

Carson Hocevar is wearing a scarlet letter among NASCAR Cup Series drivers at the moment. His latest victim was Ricky Stenhouse Jr., as the 22-year old spun the former Daytona 500 winner during this past weekend’s NASCAR Cup Series race at Nashville Superspeedway.

In the time since, Hocevar has taken a ton of criticism. His actions, as well as the way he handled the situation post-race, have left a bit to be desired from his peers.

“If he wants to talk, I’ll be glad to talk. I feel like it’s just a product of this, unfortunately. Just everybody just kind of tries to get there. I think there were a bunch of people that got shipped that either didn’t wreck or did get wrecked,” Hocevar told the media, following the race.

“At the same time I feel like maybe I could have got caught a break too with how big of a run I had. So, I think it goes both ways, or could go both ways, and that’s what we’ll talk about.”

As you can tell, Hocevar was unwilling to simply shoulder the blame for the moment in question. Continuing to make more enemies than friends isn’t a sustainable strategy, so Kevin Harvick tried to deliver some much-needed advice to the Spire Motorsports wheelman during the latest episode of Kevin Harvick’s Happy Hour.

“I think that the most important thing is to handle the political side of it off the racetrack, to make sure he’s doing that correctly. I think, you know, handling the scenario with Stenhouse correctly is important, and everybody else — I don’t know how he’s handled those scenarios up to this point. If I were Spire and I were in the management position, the most important thing is to handle it correctly, with the competitors, politically. There is a political side of this that, you know, unfortunately — it’s consistent,” Harvick stated, regarding Hocevar.

“How believable that is with the competitors is a different story, and this garage has a great way of policing itself. You just hope that it doesn’t bite him at the wrong time, and you’re in a position to win a race or whatever this scenario is, and it takes those results away. But ultimately, he’s gonna get the results, because he’s fast.”

Carson Hocevar would be wise to listen to Kevin Harvick’s advice. He’s got the speed, but there’s a couple external factors that could keep him from making the jump in the NASCAR Cup Series over the next few weeks. We’ll see if he can get there, or if he continues to anger the field.