Hendrick Motorsports has a talent for spotting young talent. But the last time a young driver from the HMS pipeline won in the second tier of NASCAR, the year was in 2007, and the driver was Kyle Busch. Now, nearly 20 years later, there’s a new name on the block, Corey Day.

Corey Day was left surprised by a certain aspect of his first win

In the final lap of the O’Reilly race at Talladega, the #17 driver held off the advances of Sheldon Creed, Jeb Burton, and more after Sam Mayer’s crash. And because Day was in the lead when the caution fell, he was declared the winner for the first time in his young career.

Speaking after the win, Day remarked that he did not expect his first win to come at a superspeedway as he thanked the Hendrick leadership and his team for putting him in victory lane at NASCAR.

“The Hendrick legacy is so strong at Superspeedway, and my #17 guys just built me a rocket ship. I feel like we’ve been close, had a good day at Rockingham, and had a couple other good days, and just didn’t finish it off, so it’s super cool. Thank you, Mr. Hendrick, so much for believing in a sprint car kid from California that never ran a pavement car in his life before two years ago, so yeah, thank you, Mr. H. Jeff Andrews, my biggest supporter, Jeff Gordon, just everyone that believes in me. It’s so much fun,” Day described.

To Day’s point, HMS has 32 wins at superspeedways. But despite his surprise at his first win coming at a plate track, the first win was a long time coming. In the 10 races before Talladega, he had finished inside the top 10 in all but two races. Three top 5s and five top 10s gave a glimpse of his talent, which was spotted much earlier by HMS star Kyle Larson on the dirt track, who relayed it to Jeff Gordon.

What followed next was a familiar story for Rick Hendrick’s team, where they spot a young talent, invest in him, and put him through the pipeline of their O’Reilly Series program. But what differentiates Corey Day’s story from the story of Kyle Busch, or Chase Elliott, or William Byron is the fact that it came in the #17 team in its new avatar for 2026.

While HMS has had multiple cars in the second tier of NASCAR for decades, it was always either a part-time program or in collaboration with JR Motorsports. Although the JRM collaboration is still there for HMS in the O’Reilly Series, it is the first time that a Hendrick car is running full-time in the second tier of NASCAR.

Last year, after announcing the #17 team’s full-time run in 2026 with Day, Rick Hendrick gave his assessment of his first season in NASCAR as a part-time driver. “The instincts and raw talent are off the charts, and he’s going to keep getting better with more seat time,” Mr. H said. 

This goes to show that with Corey Day, Hendrick Motorsports is fully invested and more or less sees him as a future Cup driver who takes their legacy of talented young drivers blossoming into NASCAR stars forward.

Having said that, Day’s life with HMS hasn’t been all fairy tale and smooth sailing.

Rick Hendrick had to get involved to get a point across to Day

At COTA earlier this season, Corey Day spun Connor Zilisch, who was racing with JR Motorsports and a contender for the win. After the race, Zilisch voiced his frustrations with Day as he said, “The same guy that does this every week does this.”

Day’s incident with Zilisch came in the wake of the young HMS driver also having an incident with another JRM driver, Carson Kvapil, at Atlanta, in which another JRM driver, Justin Allgaier, was collected. Zilisch had hoped Day could ‘figure it out,’ although it came with an intervention from Rick Hendrick himself.

This was something Dale Earnhardt Jr., co-owner of JRM, revealed on his podcast in March.

“We all got together. Rick had a conversation with Corey, and we’re all trying to help him understand, ‘Look, man, we want you here. We believe in you. We believe you’re a winner. But we have to do this without being detrimental to each other,'” Earnhardt said.

Earnhardt emphasized that while Day has a lot of talent for a 20-year-old, he also needs to understand that JRM drivers are his teammates. “That #17 car coming out of the Hendrick shop, we share all of our notes with them; everything that we do well, they have. They know this information. They’re a fifth team of ours,” he added.

One imagines that the backlash from the fans and other drivers would have surely created a lot of pressure on the 20-year-old, especially after Rick Hendrick got involved.

But just like most talented drivers do, Corey Day handled the criticism, took in the feedback, and rose to the occasion when he needed to. He’s now a NASCAR winner at 20 years old for Hendrick Motorsports, a team that took a chance and put faith in him.

Suffice to say, Day is delivering on that faith and is showing clear glimpses of the next young driver to NASCAR superstar storyline synonymous with Hendrick Motorsports.