Ryan Blaney walked into the Kansas Speedway media center on Friday afternoon with an impossible-to-miss black eye — the result of the former NASCAR Cup Series champion “[eating] a two-piece” in a fight last Saturday at Bristol with Carson Hocevar.
Aside from that visual reminder of last week’s altercation sitting underneath his left eye, there was nothing different about the Team Penske driver, keeping that typical Ryan Blaney demeanor: calm, cool, collected, and unfazed by questions about the incident, or the 23-year-old Spire Motorsports driver that he tussled with just six days ago.
The media got the opportunity to talk to both Blaney and Hocevar on Friday – a full day before on-track activity even begins for the NASCAR Cup Series – and their availabilities left the vibe of “move along, nothing to see here”.
And honestly, maybe there isn’t.
Blaney was quick to admit on Monday, in a guest appearance on Actions Detrimental with Denny Hamlin, that he regretted his behaviour after the race on Saturday, and went as far as saying that the incident between himself and Hocevar was 50-50. And that it just came down to some hard racing at Bristol Motor Speedway. He echoed those sentiments again on Friday, after further debrief with his team.
Will it change the way he races Carson Hocevar? Honestly, Blaney isn’t sure.
“I don’t know yet,” Blaney said. “These things happen. The thing on track happens really, really fast and you making decisions in a split-second of a moment and sometimes you can be skewed or not skewed of what you think happened or what actually happened, then reflecting on it for a day, watching the incident and talking back with [Tim Fedewa, spotter] and was like, yeah, pretty 50-50 I thought, just kind of a racing thing of Bristol, of two guys being aggressive with the line they wanted to be in.”
“He and I haven’t really had a problem in a year or a year-and-a-half or nothing like that. I feel like we’ve raced each other pretty good, so I don’t think there will be really anything different than racing hard in tough moments, per usual, but that’s with anybody in certain moments of the race, so I don’t see a big change.”
As far as Carson Hocevar, though, there’s been absolutely no change in demeanor for the sport’s rising star. In fact, it’s quite possible that the driver of the No. 77 Spire Motorsports Chevrolet Camaro is more giddy heading into Kansas than he has been on most race weekends… he certainly was more complimentary to Blaney than he’s been towards any driver in quite some time.
“Yeah, I mean, for me, I’ve watched this sport all my life. This tends to be the stuff that brings people closer together and you laugh about it,” Hocevar said. “I’ve never had a problem, really, with him on a racetrack. We’ve been running good together. I think he’s as stand-up of a guy as he could be. He could look at it and know that that was just racing and whatnot. In the heat of the moment, every driver is going to be biased towards themselves. And then you look at it and maybe look at things differently. You know, I looked at some things differently, obviously, from the situation. But at the same time, when you’re in the heat of the moment, it’s just the heat of the moment.”
So, despite this being the most physical run-in that Hocevar has had with a driver in the NASCAR Cup Series, this seems like the most short-lived one, too.
