He Drives 200 MPH. What Scares Him? with NASCAR Star Carson Hocevar

NASCAR driver Carson Hocevar, 23, is 6-foot-4-and-a-half and drives a 3,500-pound, 700-horsepower car at 200 miles per hour. He is afraid of heights. He is not afraid of dying on the track. He has a "safe word" with his spotter — "Superman" — meaning "stop talking, relax, you're fine." And he has never watched tape of his own races.

The Difference Between NASCAR and F1

Hocevar draws a sharp distinction between the two racing worlds. In Formula 1, the car is the star. Teams build everything from scratch, and the sport is about "who can build the best car." NASCAR, by contrast, gives every team a "spec car" — a standardized chassis and body — so the competition is about "who could just put the rat trap together the best" to match the driver's style. The cars are less expensive and less dangerous than F1 cars, which means the officiating is looser. "We make contact a lot more than F1 cars," Hocevar says. In F1, blocking someone without even making contact can draw a penalty. In NASCAR, "rubbing is racing" — a line from the 1990 Tom Cruise film Days of Thunder that Hocevar says is "a hundred percent true." The contact is strategic: bumping a rookie to rattle him, frustrate him, make him hit the wall. The ultimate unwritten rule is that you cannot wreck yourself while trying to wreck someone else. "That's a bad look," Hocevar says. Someone tried it on him last year, missed,