Carson Hocevar Won A Race In Eric Estepp's Stop Motion Series Over A Decade Before His Talladega Cup Win
- Dominic Konareski
- Apr 29
- 3 min read
Carson Hocevar is a Cup Series winner.
This past weekend’s race at Talladega was magnificent across ACRA and O’Reily, until the fuel saving of the Cup Series did bring down the intensity level. Despite that, the NASCAR Cup Series once again produced a great superspeedway finish in Alabama. Talladega is known for producing first-time winners, it has happened over a dozen times and for Carson Hocevar, he is now all-too familiar with that stat.
Carson Hocevar has come so close so many times to winning. From EchoPark to nearly winning the Daytona 500 earlier this year, it has seemed that the 23-year-old has been a frequent contender week-in and week-out. Superspeedways have been in Hocevar’s wheelhouse throughout his entire racing career. At speedways that are 2+ miles, Hocevar has 5 top-10s and an average finish of 18.1, which is second-best in his career right behind a 17.4 average finish at short tracks.
Hocevar would take the checkered flag for the first time in his Cup Series career in what was his 91st start. Hocevar has been a full-time driver in Cup since 2023, and has been quickly rising to a ‘superstar’ level in terms of media and fans. The Portage, Michigan, native definitely has the superstar personality and has embarrassed every bit of his rising fame.
This win also ends a near-decade win drought for Spire Motorsports since their rain-shortened Daytona summer win with Justin Haley when the team was a part-time underfunded organization. Now, in 2026 Spire Motorsports is a top-tier team that frequently runs top-20 and showcases top-10 running speed on the regular.
Overall, this was Hocevar’s 6th win in the top three series of NASCAR. Before he started winning in the Truck Series and got a Cup seat, Hocevar was a winner in a diecast car series on YouTube.
Many in the NASCAR community know the name Eric Estepp, either from growing up watching his 1/64th stop motion series in the early 2010s, or getting daily racing news in a video-podcast form. Estepp has grown to be one of the biggest auto racing creators on the YouTube platform, along with now being a respected name in the NASCAR media room.
Estepp began his YouTube channel on August 16th, 2011, making stop motion NASCAR race videos. Estepp’s ‘Double E Cup Series’ would become one of the most recognized stop motion racing series on the platform. As Estepp grew older, he would eventually shift his channel from stop motion and occasional parody videos to being an independent NASCAR media channel, covering news across NASCAR both in-person and remotely in his studio.
Soon after Hocevar’s win at Talladega, several social media accounts on X and Instagram mentioned how Hocevar was in the Double E Cup Series and actually won a race in it. The series had a ‘sign-up’ type system where accounts would comment what car they wanted to represent during the specific season and Hocevar, who was around 11-years-old at the time, would end up being one of the accounts chosen.
Hocevar had his @CARSONH814 account represent a Carl Edwards car. So, technically Carson Hocevar is the first racing driver to win in both a fictional toy racing series and in a real life series as well. I mean he is the first DECS winner to also win a Cup race – now that is a sentence I never thought I would type.
Through Estepp’s partnership with NASCAR interviewing the Cup winner every week, he is interviewing the winner of his stop motion race some 15-years ago, and now a Cup Series winner. What a full-circle moment.
Estepp referred to the connection in his Talladega recap video saying, “Former DECS stop motion race winner. I just saw on my Youtube hub here that I got a couple comments from people finding old videos of mine from well over a decade ago when Carson Hocevar is like an 11-year-old signed up for my old YouTube diecast stop motion series and ‘won’ a race.”
As of 2026, Eric Estepp has 261,000 subscribers and over 176 million views on YouTube.
Comments