Motorsport photo Motorsport Tue, November 3, 2026 at 2:00 PM UTC · 3 min read About Our Ads Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Kevin Harvick says Carson Hocevar has placed NASCAR in a bit of a complicated bind this week due to the aggressive brake checking that knocked Austin Cindric out of the Cup Series race at Martinsville Speedway on Sunday.
The 2014 Cup Series champion turned FOX analyst believes NASCAR will need to look at this in the same light as an intentional right rear hook. The comments were made on Monday during his weekly show with IndyCar play-by-play voice Will Buxton.
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"Yeah, usually you hold that for your worst enemies," said Harvick on the show. "Been there, done that with the brake-check thing. And usually that is leading to the last source of, 'Hey, middle finger, I don't care what you think. I'm going to I'm going to tear your day up.'
"And as I went back and watched all these videos, I just, ah, man, there wasn't a lot of contact from the 2 car, leaning on the back bumper. And then you saw what he did to Austin Cindric and the three or four brake-checks.
"So, you know, it's an interesting scenario that it has put NASCAR in, because, as I said, I've been in this scenario where you use that method. But usually, it's where you're completely mad at a situation or a person to be able to cause a war. And, you know, there was no war afterwards.
"But, you know, with the way that they've softened the front of these cars up and the things that have happened to the front bumpers over the course of this season to keep the drivers from having the impacts that they had. I think it's definitely something that, as a driver, when you have that in your tool bag, I know what I held that for."
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Harvick is referencing the decision by NASCAR made earlier in the year to make the front bumpers even softer -- that even the slightest of contact would cave them in. The reasons were one part safety and one part competitive, but two drivers weaponized this on Sunday.
Josh Berry gave a brake check to Ryan Blaney but Hocevar very aggressively over the course of multiple laps used his back bumper to retire the Team Penske No.2 from the race. In real time, spotter Tyler Green kept telling Hocevar to stop brake checking Cindric, and that went ignored.
Thus, Harvick says NASCAR needs to explore a penalty on Hocevar, whom is already under a kind of loose probation period as he's already been called into the series hauler this season too.
"I think when you look at it from a NASCAR standpoint, it's detrimental to the way that you want to see things race and probably falls into the right-rear hook category of whether it's intentional or not intentional with the way that all this happens.
"That's the dirtiest of dirty tricks that you can possibly use on the racetrack. And to see it happen three, four times on the racetrack, when you go back and you listen to his spotter, even his spotter was aggravated with the way that he was doing things and trying to tell him to move on and start racing again."
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