Despite five finishes of 30th or worst in the first eight races of the season, Carson Hocevar has avoided getting caught up in the dismal results.
It’s the encouraging performance of his No. 77 Chevrolet that has the 22-year-old from Portage, Michigan, believing his team is emerging as a force in NASCAR’s premier Cup Series.
“Our group is so strong,” said Hocevar, who is in his second full Cup season. “We’re so good on pit road. We’re good on the racetrack. We just got to be able to take advantage of the adversity. As my dad would remind me when I was a kid racing, they are character-building moments.”
Despite the disappointments, Hocevar still is part of the best start in the six-year history of Spire Motorsports, one of the season’s major surprises.
At Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Michael McDowell (a two-time Cup winner hired for 2025 by Spire) delivered the first pole in team history. Hocevar finished a career-best second at Atlanta Motor Speedway
Spire, which has yet to finish a season in the top 20 of the championship standings, has its three cars ranked between 19th and 25th in points after overhauling its roster with a host of championship veterans.
Rodney Childers, who guided Kevin Harvick to the 2014 championship and earned 40 wins as a crew chief, joined the No. 7 of Justin Haley. Dax Gerringer, formerly a lead engineer for Childers at Stewart-Haas Racing, was hired as Spire’s technical director. Matt McCall, a four-time winner as a Cup crew chief, was added as director of vehicle performance.
“A lot of the impact on our program is the unsung heroes,” Hocevar said before finishing 11th and leading two laps (despite a pit stop miscue) in the April 13 race at Bristol Motor Speedway. “It’s Matt McCall, Dax and a handful of others in the competition space.”
Their mettle will be tested as Bristol marked the quarter-pole of a 36-race season that gets only more grueling.
Emerging from the Easter off-weekend, the Cup Series will return Sunday at Talladega Superspeedway for a stretch of racing on 28 consecutive weeks through the Nov. 2 season finale at Phoenix Raceway.
Denny Hamlin, who has been another 2025 surprise in ending a long winless drought with new crew chief Chris Gayle, said he understands the reason for the marathon but fears the stress.
“There is always a breaking point,” he said. “It is harder and harder to keep people over the years. It is just generally a hard sport to be a part of because of the schedule. It is certainly not ideal.”
Here are some other surprises, good and bad, from the season so far:
In three championships from 2022-24, Team Penske developed a title blueprint of playing possum in the regular season before reeling off hot playoff runs by Joey Logano and Ryan Blaney.
The lack of early results from Penske’s trio of drivers is befuddling this season.
Logano needed seven races before his first top 10 finish, the longest stretch for a defending Cup series champion. Blaney has led five races in his No. 12 Ford but averaged a finish of 16.7 because of mechanical failures, mediocre pit stops and crash misfortune. Austin Cindric could have won the first two races at Daytonaand Atlanta but twice got wrecked.
“Last year, we didn’t run very good and then we were able to fabricate a finish somehow,” Logano said. “This year has kind of been the opposite. You name it, and it has happened. The fact that we have speed gives me a lot of confidence that a win will be around the corner at some point.”
After his debut in the championship field, Tyler Reddick keeps gathering steam with top-three rankings in NASCAR’s passing, defense and speed categories. Teammate Bubba Wallace, who missed the playoffs last year, has shown major gains on restarts (ranking third in the series with his No. 23 Toyota).
In its fifth year, the team co-owned by Hamlin and NBA legend Michael Jordan is on target for qualifying two title contenders despite the distractions of facing off with NASCAR in federal court for an antitrust battle that could drag through the year.
The preseason optimism was high for Brad Keselowski. He ended a 110-race winless streak last year and was reunited for 2025 with crew chief Jeremy Bullins, who took Keselowski to his most recent championship round appearance in 2020.
But it’s been a wipeout for the No. 6 Ford driver, whose best finish is 11th. The 2012 Cup champion is ranked 31st in the standings and is off to the worst start of his 16-season career. At 41, the driver-owner of Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing could face career decisions if the trajectory continues.
AP auto racing: https://apnews.com/hub/auto-racing
Carson Hocevar (77) goes down the back stretch during a NASCAR Cup Series auto race, Sunday, April 13, 2025, in Bristol, Tenn. (AP Photo/Wade Payne)
ATLANTA (AP) — A pregnant woman in Georgia who was declared brain dead after a medical emergency has been on life support for three months to let the fetus grow enough to be delivered, a move her family says a hospital told them was required under the state's strict anti-abortion law.
With her due date still more than three months away, it could be one of the longest such pregnancies. Her family is upset that Georgia’s law that restricts abortion once cardiac activity is detected doesn’t allow relatives to have a say in whether a pregnant woman is kept on life support.
Georgia’s so-called “heartbeat law” is among the restrictive abortion statutes that have been put in place in many conservative states since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade three years ago.
Adriana Smith, a 30-year-old mother and nurse, was declared brain-dead — meaning she is legally dead — in February, her mother, April Newkirk, told Atlanta TV station WXIA.
Newkirk said her daughter had intense headaches more than three months ago and went to Atlanta's Northside Hospital, where she received medication and was released. The next morning, her boyfriend woke to her gasping for air and called 911. Emory University Hospital determined she had blood clots in her brain and she was declared brain-dead.
Newkirk said Smith is now 21 weeks pregnant. Removing breathing tubes and other life-saving devices would likely kill the fetus.
Northside did not respond to a request for comment Thursday. Emory Healthcare said it could not comment on an individual case because of privacy rules, but released a statement saying it “uses consensus from clinical experts, medical literature, and legal guidance to support our providers as they make individualized treatment recommendations in compliance with Georgia’s abortion laws and all other applicable laws. Our top priorities continue to be the safety and wellbeing of the patients we serve.”
Smith's family says Emory doctors have told them they are not allowed to stop or remove the devices that are keeping her breathing because state law bans abortion after cardiac activity can be detected — generally around six weeks into pregnancy.
The law was adopted in 2019 but not enforced until after Roe v. Wade was overturned in the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling, opening the door to state abortion bans. Twelve states are enforcing bans on abortion at all stages of pregnancy and three others have bans like Georgia's that kick in after about six weeks.
Like the others, Georgia's ban includes an exception if an abortion is necessary to maintain the woman's life. Those exceptions have been at the heart of legal and political questions, including a major Texas Supreme Court ruling last year that found the ban there applies even when there are major pregnancy complications.
Smith's family, including her five-year-old son, still visit her in the hospital.
Newkirk told WXIA that doctors told the family that the fetus has fluid on the brain and that they're concerned about his health.
“She’s pregnant with my grandson. But he may be blind, may not be able to walk, may not survive once he’s born,” Newkirk said. She has not said whether the family wants Smith removed from life support.
Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong, the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging Georgia’s abortion law, said the situation is problematic.
"Her family deserved the right to have decision-making power about her medical decisions,” Simpson said in a statement. “Instead, they have endured over 90 days of retraumatization, expensive medical costs, and the cruelty of being unable to resolve and move toward healing.”
Thaddeus Pope, a bioethicist and lawyer at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota, said while a few states have laws that specifically limit removing treatment from a pregnant woman who is alive but incapacitated, or brain dead, Georgia isn't one of them.
“Removing the woman's mechanical ventilation or other support would not constitute an abortion,” he said. “Continued treatment is not legally required.”
Lois Shepherd, a bioethicist and law professor at the University of Virginia, also said she does not believe life support is legally required in this case.
But she said whether a state could insist Smith remains on life support is uncertain since the overturning of Roe, which found that fetuses do not have the rights of people.
“Pre-Dobbs, a fetus didn’t have any rights,” Shepherd said. “And the state’s interest in fetal life could not be so strong as to overcome other important rights, but now we don’t know.”
The situation echoes a case in Texas more than a decade ago when a brain-dead woman was kept on life support for about two months because she was pregnant. A judge eventually ruled that the hospital was misapplying state law, and life support was removed.
Brain death in pregnancy is rare. Even rarer still are cases in which doctors aim to prolong the pregnancy after a woman is declared brain-dead.
“It’s a very complex situation, obviously, not only ethically but also medically,” said Dr. Vincenzo Berghella, director of maternal fetal medicine at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.
A 2021 review that Berghella co-authored scoured medical literature going back decades for cases in which doctors declared a woman brain-dead and aimed to prolong her pregnancy. It found 35.
Of those, 27 resulted in a live birth, the majority either immediately declared healthy or with normal follow-up tests. But Berghella also cautioned that the Georgia case was much more difficult because the pregnancy was less far along when the woman was declared brain dead. In the 35 cases he studied, doctors were able to prolong the pregnancy by an average of just seven weeks before complications forced them to intervene.
“It’ s just hard to keep the mother out of infection, out of cardiac failure,” he said.
Berghella also found a case from Germany that resulted in a live birth when the woman was declared brain dead at nine weeks of pregnancy — about as far along as Smith was when she died.
Georgia's law confers personhood on a fetus. Those who favor personhood say fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses should be considered people with the same rights as those already born.
Georgia state Sen. Ed Setzler, a Republican who sponsored the 2019 law, said he supported Emory’s interpretation.
“I think it is completely appropriate that the hospital do what they can to save the life of the child,” Setzler said. “I think this is an unusual circumstance, but I think it highlights the value of innocent human life. I think the hospital is acting appropriately.”
Setzler said he believes it is sometimes acceptable to remove life support from someone who is brain dead, but that the law is “an appropriate check” because the mother is pregnant. He said Smith's relatives have “good choices,” including keeping the child or offering it for adoption.
Georgia’s abortion ban has been in the spotlight before.
Last year, ProPublica reported that two Georgia women died after they did not get proper medical treatment for complications from taking abortion pills. The stories of Amber Thurman and Candi Miller entered into the presidential race, with Democrat Kamala Harris saying the deaths were the result of the abortion bans that went into effect in Georgia and elsewhere after Dobbs.
Mulvihill reported from Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Associated Press journalists Lisa Baumann, Kate Brumback, Sharon Johnson and Charlotte Kramon contributed.
Emory University Hospital Midtown is seen on Thursday, May 15, 2025, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
Emory University Hospital Midtown is seen on Thursday, May 15, 2025, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
Emory University Hospital Midtown is seen on Thursday, May 15, 2025, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
Emory University Hospital Midtown is seen on Thursday, May 15, 2025, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
FILE - The Georgia State Capitol is seen from Liberty Plaza in downtown Atlanta, April 6, 2020. (Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP, File)
