This season’s NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series Championship Race at Phoenix Raceway will take place on Halloween night. And wouldn’t it be quite the fright if Corey Heim, who has had a record-breaking season by every metric, wasn’t able to clinch the title?
A native of Marietta, Georgia, Heim has been competing in the NASCAR Truck Series for three seasons now, and with each passing year has gotten more dominant. However, the 23-year-old driver still has no championship trophy to show for it.
Two years ago, Heim got caught up in a heated tussle with Carson Hocevar, which killed both of their chances to win the championship. But last season, the TRICON Garage team simply didn’t have enough for Ty Majeski and ThorSport Racing, coming up one spot short.
Another eleventh-hour championship loss isn’t going to erase all of the records that Heim and TRICON Garage have demolished this season (and trust me, there are a lot of them), but Heim says that it would at least put a damper on the year overall.
“It does. I think especially where we’re at as a race team. I think if we had one to our name already and could call ourselves champions of the Truck Series, it’d be a little different, but that’s kind of been the hole in our team, I guess,” Heim said. “And I don’t think it’s for a lack of a race team by any means. It’s just kind of circumstantial for how our two championship races have gone. I think we’ve shown up with good equipment both years and just kind of came up short. So, I don’t think it’s anything to hang our heads out about if it doesn’t work out, but certainly something we want to click off before it’s all said and done.”
Heim is also very well aware of the potentially unfavorable outcomes that could rear their ugly heads in Friday’s NASCAR Truck Series Championship Race, which is why on Thursday, in a Championship 4 Media Availability, he did his best to downplay his status as the overwhelming favorite.
“If you ask what it’s like, I mean, it doesn’t really feel like it, you know? I’m kind of — since this is my third year, I felt like I was potentially the media favorite going into the last year. Maybe not the overwhelming, but we carried the most wins into Phoenix and kind of got our teeth kicked in a little bit last year,” Heim added. “Yeah, I know we’ve statistically been the best truck and everything, but the way the format works, everyone’s even, and if we miss it this week, then that’s the story. That’s it. So, just kind of focused on ourselves, not really looking at who’s the odds-on or odds-off favorite. Just mostly kind of staying internal.”
In this third (and potentially final) chance at a NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series Championship, the 23XI Racing development driver is taking a different approach to Phoenix Raceway, saying that after some studying in the off-season last year, the 22-time Truck Series race-winner found that something he was doing may have been causing his “struggles” at the racetrack.
“To the weekend, no, but to this track specifically, I would say yes. I feel like, kind of like I mentioned, I feel like one of my weaknesses was short tracks or flat tracks, and I definitely did a deep dive last offseason to see kind of why that might be,” said Heim. “If it’s the truck, if it’s me, and lo and behold, I think most of it was actually on me. I did a lot of work as far as trying to get that better, working with Toyota and TRICON to understand, kind of where my weaknesses were on these kinds of race tracks, and I think it’s really shown that we’ve been able to put two and two together and definitely improve that this year.”
Regardless of what happens in Friday’s NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series Championship Race at Phoenix, Heim will be staying in Arizona so that he can watch his girlfriend, Taylor Reimer, compete in the ARCA Menards Series West event on Saturday afternoon.
