Carson Hocevar seeks culprit after NASCAR penalty and fine for Harrison Burton incident in Nashville

Carson Hocevar was in the news for the wrong reasons after an incident with Harrison Burton last weekend at the Nashville Superspeedway.

After the two had battled for the win for countless laps, Hocevar let his frustration with Burton vent and hooked him on the right rear of Caution. It was a shocking turn of events. Of course, destroying someone on Caution is absolutely forbidden and this was something that several riders and media members were upset about.

Additionally, Hocevar was fined $50,000 and had 25 driver points deducted for violating the NASCAR Code of Conduct, NASCAR announced Tuesday night. The penalty dropped Hocevar from 22nd to 24th in the standings, 181 points off the playoff cutoff. In effect, this means Hocevar now needs a win to make the playoffs, even more than he did before the penalty.

Ahead of this weekend’s race in Chicago, Hocevar is trying to put the incident behind him. “I respect their decision,” Hocevar told FOX’s Bob Pockrass of his penalty. “It doesn’t matter if I agree or not.”

Regardless of his words, it is obvious that Hocevar does not necessarily believe that he alone is responsible for what happened between him and Burton, but he knows that his team is behind him on this matter and that is what really matters to him.

“I mean, when you see the SMT, you’ll understand. I think that shows a completely different picture of the whole situation, but I’m not going to – there’s no point in publishing that or doing anything. It is what it is. I’m going to move on,” Hocevar added. “My team is very supportive and I think they fully believe me and are behind me. They assured me of that. That’s what’s really important to me.”

Hocevar went on to explain that he wanted to express his dissatisfaction with Burton, but never wanted to bring him down out of caution. From now on, he will obviously handle problems on the track differently to avoid future consequences.

“I mean, it was by no means my intention to knock him down. I went up to him to bump into him like you’ve seen a thousand times before, and I’ve done that a lot,” Hocevar said. “He wanted to put a thousand pounds of braking pressure in front of me, and obviously that’s what came out of that. But when you get into a bar fight or something, it’s not the guy who throws the final punch and takes somebody down who gets in trouble, it’s the guy who started it.

“So I’m not going to initiate anything like that in the future. If anything, I’ll either talk to him after the race or go up to him and throw my hand in the air instead of using the race car.”

Unfortunately, Carson Hocevar has been wearing the red letter all week, but he will want to make headlines for a different reason in the future – winning races rather than competing with other drivers on the track. He has the talent, now he just needs to continue to cultivate it.