Bob Pockrass
FOX Motorsports Insider
MEXICO CITY — Ricky Stenhouse Jr. doesn’t care if Carson Hocevar made a mistake Sunday.
Stenhouse sounded like a driver who cared about just getting even, but with the knowledge he probably shouldn’t do anything on foreign soil that could make things even more complicated for him.
Hocevar turned Stenhouse during the final stage Sunday of the inaugural Cup race at Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez, and after the race Stenhouse went to Hocevar’s car and with Hocevar still in it, yelled at him and hit his helmet.
“I am going to beat your ass when we get back in the States,” Stenhouse told him.
Carson Hocevar has drawn the ire of Ricky Stenhouse Jr. after recent racing incidents.
Hocevar had turned Stenhouse just two weeks earlier at Nashville. So two times in three races did Hocevar ruined a potential solid finish for the veteran Stenhouse.
“I told him on the phone [after Nashville], if it happens again, we’re going to have issues,” Stenhouse said after the brief exchange. “And then that one was even worse because he’s a lap down. He’s racing nobody.
“I was working on the 34 [of Todd Gilliland] trying to work my way forward. The tire attrition was pretty difficult coming down to the end of it. And just from two, three [lengths] back, he just ran right in the back of us. A really dumb move, two out of three weeks on me now.”
In his second year of Cup racing, Hocevar tried to get in a few words with Stenhouse to admit the mistake.
“I know he was very mad, and I was very apologetic,” Hocevar said. “I just got left and in the marbles and slid a lot longer than I expected. Obviously, No. 1, that’s not somebody I would ever want to hit again. But No. 2, I wasn’t racing anything. I was just logging laps, just trying to wait on a yellow and maybe see if we can put our day back together.
“I just hit a curb wrong and got in the marbles and slid all the way through the corner. I tried to turn left and avoid him. But just a really, really sloppy day by me. And then that was another incident of the day that was really just sloppy.”
And Stenhouse was really mad. He finished 27th; Hocevar 34th.
“I normally don’t cuss or anything, but that stuff gets me pretty heated when I’m out there on the lead lap, trying to work my way forward,” Stenhouse said. “I felt like we had a car that was better on the long run versus the guys we were racing and felt like I could have got into the top-20 right there, but didn’t have the opportunity.”
Bob Pockrass covers NASCAR and IndyCar for FOX Sports. He has spent decades covering motorsports, including over 30 Daytona 500s, with stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter @bobpockrass.
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