Ricky Stenhouse Jr. appeared to completely quash any kind of brewing feud between him and Carson Hocever after Stenhouse’s day at Nashville was ended after he spun off of Hocevar’s nose in stage 2.
Speaking with members of the media ahead of the NASCAR Cup Series race at Michigan, Stenhouse shared that he had a conversation with Hocevar and he no longer believes that he intentionally wrecked him.
Stenhouse shared, “I was able to see what his thought process was during the whole incident. I don’t think he crashed me on purpose, but I do think he was super impatient. You know, he had only been behind me for two laps. It’s not like I was holding him up. I held Preece up for 30 laps before that and then Preece got a run on the outside and he passed me. His thought process was he had a little run down the back and he thought he could overdrive the corner and get to my inside, which he never did. And he said that he waited just a hair too long to decide that he wasn’t going to get there and by the time he did that he ran into the back of us.”
“I told him I thought that was pretty impatient,” Stenhouse continued. “But like I said, we’ve never had any issues. He’s had plenty of issues with other people. So I told him that if it becomes a routine or if it happens again like that — I didn’t feel like that was a thing that really needed to happen that early in the stage, that early in the race especially, obviously as fast as his car was. I told him, ‘As fast as your cars have been, you don’t want to keep making people mad.’ The amount of texts I got from competitors and other people in the garage to confront him like I did Kyle or crash him on purpose was a lot. It was kind of shocking. So I just told him that.”
Stenhouse then indicated he does not plan to retaliate moving forward, “If we get in a pissing match and I crash him this weekend, we go back and forth, that does none of us good. We’re still only six points out of the playoffs and that’s what we’re focused on at Hyak and trying to get back in to the playoffs.”
“I Don’t Think He [@CarsonHocevar] Crashed Me on Purpose”- @StenhouseJr comments on his incident at Nashville. #NASCAR pic.twitter.com/uAUw9mGxJn
— Frontstretch (@Frontstretch) June 7, 2025
Earlier in the week Stenhouse joked that his post-race comments about not confronting Hocevar following the race because it would be “too expensive” was because it was “not going to be for reconstruction on my face.”
As for Hocevar, he told SiriusXM NASCAR Radio earlier in the week, ” went in and I thought maybe I could get there or I was going to get there and get a little bit more space. And for his arc, I thought he was going to go around the middle with [Ty Gibbs] running the bottom. And thought I could get in a little deeper and have his spotter call inside and he just came all the way down and I landed right into his left rear, backed him into the fence. I don’t want to do it and I feel bad for it. Obviously, somebody wrecked their racecar.”
Furthermore, Hocevar indicated he wanted to smooth things over noting, “We don’t want to put any more targets on my back because I’ve created the world I live in with just the reputation. I understand that. So you don’t want to do anything more to put a bigger target on your back, I guess, per se.”
What do you make of Stenhouse’s comments?