Kaden Honeycutt’s run at the 2025 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series Championship will not be forgotten by NASCAR fans any time soon.
After 16 races, Honeycutt, racing in his first full-time NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series season, found himself sixth in points entering Watkins Glen with just two races left until the 2025 Playoffs.
But the week leading up to Watkins Glen would serve as a turning point for Honeycutt, as he and his team, Niece Motorsports, cut ties, with the team citing that he had signed with a different team and manufacturer—later revealed to be Toyota—for 2026.
While Honeycutt would find a full-time ride for the rest of the season, filling in for injured Halmar Friesen Racing driver-owner Stewart Friesen after the Glen, he still needed a ride for that weekend. He eventually landed at Young’s Motorsports and slipped out of the weekend in 34th, falling to eighth in points.
Honeycutt ultimately made the playoffs with Halmar Friesen, coming up just short of the title as he, Ty Majeski, and Tyler Ankrum all chased the rear bumper of Corey Heim’s No. 11.
As the checkered flag fell on Heim’s championship season and his final full-time year in trucks, unbeknownst to NASCAR fans, Honeycutt was the man on deck to drive Tricon Garage’s flagship truck in 2026.
Heim’s record-breaking 2025 was a tough act to follow, but the opportunity Tricon and the Toyota camp offered Honeycutt was far too great to pass up.
Besides, the No. 11 team, led by veteran Scott Zipadelli, made the 22-year-old feel right at home from the start.
“It’s been a really great journey,” Honeycutt said. “The guys don’t put any pressure on me. They don’t say, ‘Hey, yeah, we won here last time, now you need to do it too.’ It’s just been an amazing team to work with.”
Nevertheless, the team faced high expectations right out of the gate, as most fans felt that Tricon, Honeycutt, and Zipadelli were a match made in heaven.
But, Honeycutt still faced challenges up the road, as his journey to victory lane saw early heartbreak in the 2026 season.
While they might not have found victory lane right off the bat, the No. 11 team kicked off the season by hitting the marks that they had under Heim. This stretch included three top-five finishes and four top-ten finishes in the first handful of races this season.
Even then, Honeycutt still had some heartbreakers early on, with back-to-back races at Darlington Raceway and Rockingham Speedway leaving the team feeling like they left quite a bit on the table.
At Darlington, Honeycutt started on the pole for the first time in his NASCAR career. Still, after leading just 59 laps, Honeycutt fell back during an overtime restart and was left to watch the battle for the win instead of participating in it.
That next weekend, the story at Tricon had again shifted back to Heim, who, while racing part-time in two separate entries for the team, won both Darlington and Rockingham, tying Honeycutt for the points lead.
At the Rock, Honeycutt, seeing flashbacks from last year’s playoffs, chased the rear bumper of Heim as the laps wound down, but missed his chance to get by his teammate coming to the line.
Still, Honeycutt feels that these two missed opportunities were a necessary step in his long path to victory lane, leaving the young driver with lessons learned in clutch moments.
“I feel like Rockingham or Darlington were two dead giveaways,” Honeycutt said. “I think just losing those two… definitely hurt, but also motivated me to figure out, ‘How do I not let something like this happen again?'”
After another pole position at Bristol Motor Speedway and a solid run at Texas Motor Speedway, Honeycutt maintained his points lead heading back to the track where his 2025 championship hopes almost went up in smoke.
Of course, Honeycutt, a proven short track talent and former CARS Pro Late Model Tour Champion, was likely not on the top of anyone’s prediction list entering Watkins Glen in mid-May.
Prior to that race, and before joining Tricon, the Texas native had an 18.75 average finish in five road course starts. Adding to the stacked odds, Honeycutt and the rest of his fellow Truck Series full-timers were facing one of the fiercest lineups in recent Series history.
This included then-six-time Cup Series road and street course winner Shane Van Gisbergen, six-time NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series road course winner Connor Zilisch, and one of the sport’s original modern-era road course aces, A.J. Allmendinger.
For Honeycutt, this daunting list of names is nothing more than more competition, saying that while they are great drivers, he has to treat them like anyone else coming into the Truck Series.
“They’re obviously special guys, going from Cup to Truck, but to me, they’re another competitor,” Honeycutt said. “Where they’re coming into our playground, it’d be no different if we were going into their playground on Sundays and competing against them. We just treat them like they’re another driver and respect them. But also, we race them hard, because we want to win in our own series as much as they just want to win and any type of car.”
After qualifying seventh for the Truck Series race, Honeycutt’s weekend got off to a hot start, as he brought home his first-ever ARCA Menards Series win in dominant fashion.
As he hopped behind the wheel of his Truck, Honeycutt sat back and allowed other drivers to make their own mistakes, a lesson he had learned from some small mistakes in a fifth-place run in the first road course race on the streets of St. Petersburg in February.
“St. Pete to start the season off at a road course just wasn’t great,” Honeycutt said. ”I just made too many mistakes all day, but it was still a 5th-place finish. I was like, ‘Man, if I can just get rid of three-quarters of all my mistakes, I can win these races on the road course,’ and I just needed to do that for Watkins Glen.”
Even when one of these mistakes happened early on in the race, when the team was sent to the back of the field for pitting after pit road had closed while trying to flip stage one, Honeycutt didn’t let this small moment get in his head, setting up for a chance at his first win.
In a full-circle moment, with lessons learned from mistakes earlier this season, Honeycutt took his chance during an overtime restart, slipping in front of race leader Connor Zilisch in turn one and pulling away with the lead and the win.
That move, the first race-winning move of Honeycutt’s NASCAR career, marked the end of an odd period of his career, a period of transition that began and ended at Watkins Glen.
During the cool-down lap, Honeycutt looked back on his unlikely journey to his new home and victory lane.
“On the cool down lap after the race, I would say… it was just really cool, man,” Honeycutt said. “It was ironically the race I had to figure out how to find a ride for to stay in the playoffs last year. And going back and doing that, it was like, who would have thought? I just never thought that would have been possible.”
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