Zane Smith looked at his phone and saw Carson Hocevar posting “Admit One” to social media, a shrug dressed up as a joke, hours after contact between the two sent both their cars into the wall at Chicagoland Speedway. That image stuck with him. So when a podcast host asked him to sum up a rival in one word, Smith didn’t reach for anything polite.
“Bum-[expletive],” Smith said on a new episode of “Racin’ With The Boys,” which debuted July 9 alongside fellow driver Riley Herbst and host Taylor Lewan. He kept going. “He tries to be your buddy and then will go and screw you,” Smith said of Hocevar. “Like, just don’t talk to me in the first place because, one, I don’t like you, and we’re gonna eventually have a run-in together, so let’s just not talk in the first place.”
A Feud With a Year-Long Paper Trail
This isn’t a fight that started at Chicagoland. Last year at Iowa Speedway, contact from Hocevar sent Smith into the wall and ended his day early. Smith said his piece about it then, too, in an interview a week later that carried the same edge as his latest comments. A full year passed, and the anger hasn’t cooled by a single degree.
Then came Chicagoland. On Lap 32, with both drivers making their 100th career Cup Series starts on the same night, Smith made contact with Hocevar that sent both cars up the track and into the wall. NASCAR reviewed the incident and handed down no penalties. But the series told both drivers they would need to sit down with officials before the next race at EchoPark Speedway, a sign that this wasn’t being treated as a routine racing incident.
“Honestly, my approach with Carson, because he’s fast, me and him had a run-in at Iowa, and we’ve raced hard and whatnot,” Smith said. “And there’s a difference. Certain guys will race you hard, but he’ll just put us both in a bad spot to where it’s costing us lap time and neither of us are benefiting from it. That part gets frustrating.”
What bothers Smith most isn’t the contact itself. Drivers trade paint every week and mostly shake it off by Monday. It’s the aftermath that gets under his skin.
“I remember he made a mistake, I don’t know if he made a mistake, but he wrecked us and then spends the rest of the race waving at me like playing nice guy of, ‘So sorry! I’m so sorry!'” Smith said. “Then he goes on social media and posts like ‘Admit One,’ like ‘I don’t give a [expletive].'”
Herbst, sitting next to him, didn’t let the moment pass. “Like ‘take a number,'” he added, capturing the sense that Hocevar has built a list of rivals long enough to need a ticket system.
The Word Smith Chose on Purpose
Smith didn’t stumble into calling Hocevar a coward. He built the case for it deliberately, tying the label to what he sees as a pattern of behavior rather than a single incident.
“It’s like if you’re going to be the guy hiding behind social media, like I don’t know, that’s a coward in my opinion,” Smith said. “Act that way in person. Say that to my face. And it’s like, all right, I’m going to be the same way. But don’t be one way in person and then hide behind your phone.”
Smith also drew a line most drivers would recognize as the standard for not letting a rivalry turn ugly, even while admitting he can’t quite manage it with Hocevar. “You don’t try to go down a road of like, ‘Oh my gosh, I hope he gets wrecked,’ or something like that,” Smith said. “You’re focused on your own race. But it’s just the hiding behind the phone is what’s the most annoying part.”
Hocevar Answers From a Twitch Stream
Hocevar heard about Smith’s comments the way most of the NASCAR world did, through clips online, and he answered from a livestream rather than a formal statement. Asked in his Wednesday night Twitch chat what Smith’s problem was, Hocevar shrugged the whole thing off.
“What’s Zane’s problem? I don’t know, man, maybe his T-shirt sales were low,” Hocevar said. “I don’t know. Who cares?”
The line was pure Hocevar: needling, dismissive, and designed to get under the skin of exactly the people it’s aimed at. It also did nothing to answer Smith’s underlying complaint that Hocevar plays nice to a driver’s face and different online. If anything, the joke reinforced it.
Smith Isn’t Alone in the Paddock
Part of what makes this feud different from a normal two-driver dispute is how many other people in the garage seem to share Smith’s frustration. Lewan, the podcast host, said the reaction from his guests has become a pattern rather than an exception.
“Every single driver that’s come on this bus, and you guys have been the most blunt about it, but after, will be like, ‘no dude, [expletive] that guy. The way he drives,’ all this,” Lewan said. He added that Kyle Larson had made similar comments to him privately, saying he doesn’t respect the way Hocevar races. Lewan summed up Hocevar’s standing in the garage bluntly: a driver “sitting on an island and being hated by everybody, essentially being the Joker from Batman.”
That reputation didn’t happen by accident. Hocevar built his name in the Cup Series through hard-charging, occasionally reckless aggression, the kind of driving that wins him admirers among fans who like a villain and enemies among the drivers he’s put into walls along the way. He has never shied away from that persona. If anything, he leans into it, and the Twitch comment about Smith’s T-shirt sales fits a driver who seems to enjoy being disliked as much as being fast.
What Happens at EchoPark
NASCAR’s decision to sit both drivers down before Sunday’s race at EchoPark Speedway signals that officials are watching this one closely, even without penalties on the books. A meeting before a race is not standard procedure. It’s a message that the sanctioning body wants both men in the same room and on notice before they line up together again.
For Smith, the stakes go beyond one rivalry. The No. 38 Front Row Motorsports Ford has become a program on the rise. Smith, the 2022 Truck Series champion who signed a multiyear extension with Front Row Motorsports last October, has built his Cup Series career on a reputation for racing hard but fair, a résumé built on speed rather than controversy. Getting pulled into a public dispute with the driver the whole garage loves to complain about isn’t the kind of storyline Smith was chasing, but he clearly isn’t backing away from it either.
For Hocevar, the pattern is becoming the story. A driver who wants to be known for his results at Spire Motorsports keeps finding himself at the center of conversations about how he treats the people racing next to him. Whether that changes at EchoPark, where both drivers will be back on the same mile-and-a-half oval that hosted their Chicagoland contact just one week earlier, remains to be seen.
What’s clear from Smith’s appearance on “Racin’ With The Boys” is that this isn’t a feud that ends with a handshake and a quiet word in the trailer. It’s built on a year of history, a pattern of behavior Smith says he’s watched repeat itself, and a growing chorus of other drivers nodding along in agreement, even if most of them aren’t willing to say it publicly the way Smith just did.
There’s also a generational piece to this that fans keep pointing to online. Smith and Hocevar both arrived in the Cup Series through the Truck Series, both built reputations as some of the hardest chargers in that division, and both now find themselves fighting for the same real estate on Sunday afternoons against veterans with decades of seniority. That shared path could have made them allies. Instead, it produced two drivers who understand exactly how the other operates and have decided they don’t like what they see. Smith’s podcast comments didn’t come out of nowhere. They came from a driver who has spent a full season watching a rival he already didn’t trust do the same things that bothered him at Iowa, then again at Chicagoland, with no sign of it stopping before EchoPark.
