Is Corey Heim vs. Carson Hocevar the next NASCAR rivalry?

Corey Heim has won a Cup Series race in just 14 starts, and he did it on Father's Day at Sonoma with his dad watching. That fact alone makes him an outlier in a sport where team owners routinely say young drivers need 100 races before they can truly compete. On this episode of SPEED with Harvick and Buxton, Heim sat down to explain why his path has been different — and why he thinks the 100-race rule is overblown.

Why the Next Gen car feels different from trucks

Heim has raced and won in the Truck Series, but the Cup Series Next Gen car presents a fundamentally different challenge. The key difference, he says, is that you cannot drive the Next Gen car sideways. "By the time you're counter steering into the corner, it's already too late," Heim explains. In trucks, he could feel the yaw — the rotation of the car — and instinctively know how loose or tight he was. In the Cup car, the rear tires are much harder to read. "It's just so hard to feel when the tires are oversaturated and you're asking too much out of them," he says. The solution, he has found, is to slow everything down: slower hands, slower pedal inputs, staying under the tire rather than over-slipping the front tires. When he got choppy and loose during the Chicago race, he had to consciously tell himself to "slow everything down" before he started moving forward again.