NASCAR star admits regret over derogatory comments

Corey LaJoie has apologised for comments he made about drivers who take full-time Xfinity and Truck Series drives over trying to cling onto a Cup Series spot.

LaJoie was speaking in January about his decision to reject full-time offers with Xfinity and Truck teams to focus on running a part-time entry in the Cup Series after losing his full-time seat.

The 33-year-old, who has totalled 0 wins in his 275 Cup Series entries, has now accepted an offer to drive for Spire Motorsports to run nine of the last 13 Truck Series races in 2025 after rhetorically asking in January: "Do you wanna go pump the ego up and hold a trophy on a Friday when there’s 12 people in the grandstands?"

When the subject of his earlier comments inevitably came up this weekend ahead of the first of those nine races, he blamed the outburst on being 'hangry' because he was fasting.

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LaJoie: I'm Sorry for What I Said When I Was Hungry

"I've said a lot of dumb things on camera, so that was just another one," he said. "So just to clear context up for everybody, I said that on the morning of a five-day fast. I wish I wouldn't have added that '12 (fans)' comment bit, because then people within the Truck garage took offense to it.

Then...there's so many things that it came out of, and it's such a negative light for just a couple comments that I said when I was hangry."

In what some Gen Z'ers online might call 'astonishing cope', he added: "My only focus in my entire life was to be a Cup Series driver. No, that's all I want to do. That's all that I cared to work for since I was 12 years old, right? I was really pissed off and hungry, but that was my focus is to try to get back to Sunday with the right group.

"But now, this is like, fun. I've been running some modified races, some late model races. I want to have fun because the Cup garage takes a lot of the fun out of it.

"It really does, because it's just a grind, and especially when you're not running as good as you want to run, it legitimately sucks the life out of you if you're not getting any sort of external validation from it."

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