What a wild transformation this has been. When Corey Day stepped into his first full-time season in the NASCAR O'Reilly Auto Parts Series, the 20-year-old driver had wonderfully grounded expectations, hoping simply to win a race and make The Chase. Coming from a background in micro sprints, sprint cars, and dirt bikes instead of stock cars, nobody knew quite what to expect from the young pilot. Fast forward to October, and the No. 17 Hendrick Motorsports machine is right in the thick of a championship battle.
Now sitting third in the table and 39 points behind Chase leader Jesse Love after entering The Chase presented by Mobil 1 as the No. 7 seed, Day has racked up four wins, 11 top fives, 20 top 10s, and 394 laps led through 30 races. His Victory Lane tour started with a breakthrough at Talladega Superspeedway in April, followed by a victory at Dover Motor Speedway in May, and back-to-back Chase wins at Las Vegas Motor Speedway and Charlotte Motor Speedway. That run even put him in the history books as the first Hendrick driver to win consecutive O'Reilly races since Kyle Busch back in 2004.
To be a champion is obviously something you dream of for your whole life when this is what you want to do and being a race car driver, so yeah, it would be crazy, to tell you the truth,
"It's pretty cool to look back on, for sure," Day told NASCAR.com. "To think, at the beginning of the year, I obviously hadn't won anything yet and was still doing a lot of learning and struggling to kind of figure this all out, it's pretty cool to look back."
Of course, life in stock cars hasn't been without its bruises. Early-season scrapes at EchoPark Speedway involving Justin Allgaier and Carson Kvapil, plus a run-in with Connor Zilisch at Circuit of The Americas, highlighted his steep learning curve. Then came opening Chase skirmishes with William Sawalich at Darlington Raceway and World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway that ultimately drew a hauler visit at Bristol Motor Speedway. Day admits those incidents showed his stock-car inexperience, though crew chief Adam Wall notes that the willingness to learn from every single bump is what keeps their momentum moving forward.
Wall, a 37-year-old University of North Carolina at Charlotte motorsports engineering graduate who started by sweeping floors in the chassis shop before joining the No. 17 camp in 2025 after a stint at JR Motorsports, sees a refreshing simplicity in his driver. Comparing Day's straightforward, clean-slate mindset to Kyle Larson from their time together on the No. 5 team in the NASCAR Cup Series from 2021-2023, Wall points out that Day relies less on rigid data and more on an in-the-weekend approach.
With just three Chase races remaining—starting at Talladega, the very site of Day's first triumph—the dream of delivering a title in Hendrick's first full-time O'Reilly season since 2006 is entirely real. "To be a champion is obviously something you dream of for your whole life when this is what you want to do and being a race car driver, so yeah, it would be crazy, to tell you the truth," Day said.
