In the recent NASCAR race weekend in Mexico, Ricky Stenhouse Jr. had some unfriendly words for Carson Hocevar after the former collided with the latter. In fact, Stenhouse was heard suggesting Carson would be the recipient of bodily harm upon their return to the United States. We can further link the two indirectly through a sort of NASCAR version of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.
We had recently discussed Hocevar being handed a $50,000 fine by his own team for comments about Mexico prior to the race. Stenhouse has not suffered a similar fate, but his spotter did. Tab Boyd was Ricky Stenhouse Jr.'s spotter prior to being fired for comments about Mexico. This one might be a bit more tricky, however, as Hocevar's comments were made in ignorance and he confessed to as much, whereas Boyd's comments were in reaction to something that happened to him.
We at Absolute Zero Motorsport know of no means of verifying whether this actually happened or not, but according to Tab Boyd, he barely stepped out of the hotel wherein he was staying in Mexico and found himself harassed and ultimately robbed of his money. He was understandably upset by this encounter and shared his experience online, for which he has subsequently been fired.
On X (formerly Twitter), Boyd said on a since-deleted account, "I’m ready to go home, screw this place, people can talk it up all they want." He continued with “Can’t even walk out the front door of the hotel without getting hustled and money snatched… in less than 5 minutes." For the sake of being fluffy, we'll slightly censor his statement of "Good area my ***."
On the surface, both the Hocevar and Boyd comments about Mexico were a bad look, disrespecting a country and its people. However, and this is the part where I'll upset someone, I don't think these two scenarios are equal. Hocevar spoke poorly of Mexico based on negative stereotypes and comments from conservatives, whereas Boyd's comments were a result of a very negative experience he personally had, at least allegedly. Now, of course, it would be completely different if his story is completely untrue, and I have no way of knowing whether it is or isn't. If it's false, then the whole thing is entirely disgusting. If it's true, I empathize, though I might make the argument that it's unfair to blame millions of people for the actions of a handful. In fairness to Mexico, people get mugged in the United States, as well.
The Hocevar incident was more black and white to me. Based on the scant information available to me at this time, the Boyd situation feels more gray to me. Yes, it's unfair to condemn the many for the actions of a few, but simultaneously he's only human and that's a human understandably upset by a bad encounter.
