Nick Hoffman, "The Thrill From Mooresville," will run Spire Motorsports' dirt late model program full-time starting in 2027. Photo: Spire Motorsports
Carson Hocevar has had an unofficial dirt racing coach for a while now, and on September 10, Spire Motorsports made the arrangement a lot more permanent. The Cup Series team announced it will field a full-time dirt late model entry beginning in 2027, with Nick Hoffman — Hocevar’s occasional mentor and one of the winningest dirt racers alive — behind the wheel.
The timing is deliberate. Hoffman gets a preview run this year, debuting in Spire’s No. 7 NOS Energy Drink Longhorn Chassis at the Gateway Dirt Nationals, Dec. 3-5, before taking over the full national tour schedule next season. If you haven’t watched Gateway before, it’s worth knowing it isn’t a normal dirt race: promoters truck in enough clay to build a temporary quarter-mile oval inside The Dome at America’s Center in St. Louis, turning a football stadium into a short track for one weekend. It’s a different discipline than the 4/10-mile bullrings dirt racers run outdoors — tighter, weirder, and unusually punishing on patience.
Hoffman’s résumé makes clear Spire didn’t pick him for name recognition among NASCAR fans — quite the opposite, since most casual Cup viewers have no idea who he is. He’s made more than 300 national-tour dirt late model starts with over 20 feature wins, and he’s currently second in the 2026 World of Outlaws Late Models standings, sitting 112 points back with nine races left after six wins and 42 top-10 finishes across 45 events. Counting his Lucas Oil and FloRacing Night in America starts, he’s put together nine wins across 64 total features this season, including a victory at Eldora’s Baltes Classic last weekend. Go back further and the résumé gets even more absurd: five DIRTcar Summer Nationals titles, that series’ all-time win record at 69 feature victories, seven consecutive UMP Modified Big Gator championships, and a chassis-manufacturing business — Elite Chassis — that he owns and founded himself.
That last detail is worth sitting with. Hoffman builds and sells his own chassis brand, yet his Spire ride is a Longhorn. In dirt late model racing, a driver’s chassis affiliation functions like a rolling billboard — wins sell chassis, and chassis sales fund race teams — so putting one of the sport’s most recognizable manufacturer-drivers in a competitor’s car is a real business decision, not a footnote. It’s a strong signal that Spire, not Hoffman, is calling the equipment shots on this program, which says a lot about how it’s actually going to be run.
It’s also not Spire’s first dirt rodeo. Tucked into the team’s own boilerplate is the fact that it already fields a sprint car in Interstate Batteries High Limit Racing alongside its NASCAR Cup and Craftsman Truck programs. Hoffman’s hire expands a grassroots wing that already existed rather than inventing one from scratch, and it gives Spire an actual driver-development function to point to. Carson Hocevar’s Chase-clinching run at New Hampshire has already benefited informally from Hoffman’s dirt-racing coaching; making that relationship a job title means Spire keeps it even if a bigger team eventually comes calling for Hoffman’s time.
That kind of formalized investment in dirt talent is becoming a pattern worth tracking across the garage, not just at Spire. Hendrick Motorsports recently extended Corey Day and added a limited 2027 Cup schedule while he keeps running dirt full time — essentially the mirror image of what Spire just did, planting a NASCAR flag on a dirt career instead of the other way around. Both moves say the same thing: dirt racing isn’t a hobby program anymore for organizations with Cup-level budgets. It’s a real pipeline, and increasingly, a business line of its own.
Spire’s ambitions extend past the dirt shop, too. Co-owner Jeff Dickerson called Hoffman “a unicorn” in announcing the deal — part championship driver, part chassis entrepreneur, and, in Dickerson’s words, someone who “stands on the gas.” That kind of full-commitment roster-building fits a broader theme heading into 2027: teams around the garage aren’t just adding names, they’re locking in multi-year plans and expanding programs, the same logic behind Legacy Motor Club’s all-in three-car bet for 2027.
What’s actually worth watching: whether Hoffman can close that 112-point gap in the World of Outlaws standings over the final nine races of this season before his Spire duties even start, how the Longhorn-over-Elite-Chassis call plays out once the full-time program begins, and whether his Gateway Dirt Nationals debut in December looks like a driver adjusting to new equipment or a five-time champion who could win in anything. Grassroots dirt racing has no shortage of NASCAR money circling it these days. The more interesting story here isn’t that Spire wrote a check. It’s that they wrote it for a driver who was already beating everybody before most of the Cup garage knew his name.
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