From Stress to Salvation: Heim Captures 2025 NASCAR Truck Series Championship
- Crystal Clay
- Nov 1
- 6 min read
By Crystal Clay
AVONDALE, Ariz. — Corey Heim didn’t so much win the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series championship as refuse to let anyone else touch it.
The moment that’s going to run on loop all winter is obvious. Overtime. Phoenix Raceway under the lights. The field explodes seven-wide into Turn 1 like a pack of shopping carts breaking loose, and the No. 11 Safelite Toyota just knifes under all of it. Paint, pride, whatever was left. Heim drags it along the inside wall, committed, unapologetic, and comes out the other side already hunting Ty Majeski’s bumper.
But that’s not where the night started for him. And it’s definitely not where the season did.
“I’ve been, like, so terrible to talk to as a person,” he said, still in his firesuit. “So stressed out. Ever since we went to the Roval, I’ve just been wound up.”
That’s not bravado. That’s a 23-year-old who walked into Phoenix Raceway as “him”. Not “one of four.” HIM. The one with 11 wins in 24 races coming in. The one who had already rewritten the record book before the green flag even fell.
And the one who knew, if he didn’t close, people were going to talk about everything except how good he really is.
“This year we came back and broke just about every record you possibly could,” Heim said. “I felt the pressure that if I didn’t get the championship, that cherry on top… even if we had no wins to our name in 2025, we were trying to win the championship. That was the number one goal.”
This wasn’t his first shot. Heim has been in the Championship 4 three consecutive seasons. In 2023, he said, things “got out of control.” In 2024 he felt like “it was our year,” and he left Phoenix talking about how they “got our teeth kicked in.”
This time? No. Not again.
And he had help.
The box score from Friday night at Phoenix is going to look clean in the archives. Corey Heim swept Stages 1 and 2. He led 100 of 161 laps. He cleared the defending Champion Ty Majeski on the final restart and won by 0.993 seconds in double overtime. He finished off his twelfth win of the season, extending the Truck Series single-season wins record, and finally left the desert as the 2025 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series champion.
But in real time, it wasn’t that calm.
With just over two laps left in regulation, Layne Riggs was out front. Heim was chasing. And the math was about to get weird: Riggs, eliminated from the driver Playoffs last week at Martinsville on a tiebreaker, was still alive for the owners’ championship. Had the race ended under green right there, Riggs likely would’ve walked off with the win and owners’ title, and Heim would have locked the driver’s championship by finishing second.
Then Connor Mosack hit the Turn 4 wall. Caution. Everything reset.
For TRICON Garage crew chief Scott Zipadelli, that yellow was a decision point. For Heim, it was a test of faith.
All night, the 11 had speed. Heim said they “struggled all weekend in practice a little bit,” and “missed it a little bit” in qualifying. The speed was there, the handling wasn’t. Zipadelli and the 11 crew had to build that balance in real time as Phoenix cooled down under the lights.
And suddenly, with the title on the line, they had to choose tires.
Zipadelli called for four.
On paper, that’s the “safer” call. In reality, at Phoenix with two to go, it’s a trap: Championships here are won on pit road. You give up all the track position you’ve spent 150 laps earning and just pray you get to use the grip before you run out of laps.
Heim hated watching the world drive past him.
“Yeah, I was disappointed to see everyone roll by me,” he said. “It’s a track position racetrack. I really did think two tires was the call, to be honest with you. But that’s why I’m not a crew chief.”
He came off pit road as the first truck on four tires, in 10th.
And that’s the point where most drivers start thinking about everything that can go wrong. Heim didn’t. He flipped into something closer to obligation.
“Nobody was going to beat me tonight,” he said. “I don’t care if I was on hundred-lap tires, nobody was going to beat me tonight. It wasn’t going to happen.”
On the first overtime restart, Heim took the bottom. He’d already made up his mind that he’d rather control his fate shoving up than be the guy on the outside waiting to get slid into.
“When you’ve got a guy that stayed out on 50-lap tires, you put him on the front row,” he said. “If you don’t give yourself a gap, you’re screwed.”
He gave himself a gap.
What happened next is the clip.
Coming to green, he told his spotter, basically: I can’t really see; coach me. Once they hit the line, instinct took over. He downshifted to third early. Dropped to the apron so far left he was nearly scraping the inside wall. Stayed in the throttle. Trusted the tires. Trusted the fact that, for once, he wasn’t reacting to chaos, he was creating separation.
“I figured we’d be three or four wide,” he said. “Not seven wide.”
Seven-wide into Turn 1 of Phoenix Raceway is the kind of thing that usually ends with bent sheet metal and a quiet, embarrassed ride to the infield care center. Heim just drove out of it.
“I went lower and lower until [the truck ahead of me] couldn’t anymore and I could with my tires,” he said. “I didn’t think about it very much at all. I went off muscle memory.”
By the time they hit Turn 2, he’d gone from 10th to clean air. By the second overtime restart, it was over. He cleared Majeski, drove away, and finally let that pressure go.
There are stats to hang on this if you want them. Some of them don’t even sound real.
Heim led at least one lap in all 25 Truck Series races this year — no driver in the history of the series had ever done that. When he took the lead from Chandler Smith on Lap 22 Friday, he finished the set. He ends 2025 with 1,625 laps led, breaking the Truck Series single-season record of 1,533 that dated back to Mike Skinner in 1996. He has 12 wins this year, and 23 career Truck wins. He finished this season with zero DNFs. Zero. That’s not just dominance; that’s control.
But if you ask him what matters, he doesn’t start with any of that.
He starts with his team.
“It’s really a big family, honestly,” Heim said. “We won as a family. We’ve had literally every person, other than pit crew, together on that 11 crew since the middle of 2023. Obviously guys want to work for [Scott Zipadelli] and with him. He’s the captain of that.”
He talks about Toyota taking a chance on him. About 23XI and the internal prep work. About Trevor and Blake and his sim work. About his spotter. About his dad.
“I could probably count on one hand how many races he’s missed in my entire life,” Heim said earlier this week on media day. “He’s always been my number one supporter… I certainly wouldn’t be here without that.”
And then, quietly, he talks about responsibility.
He knows he came into this weekend with the best equipment in the garage. He said that out loud: “the best truck team in the garage.” He also said that made it heavier, not easier.
“To be able to have an opportunity to work with what I think is the best truck team that’s ever been assembled with those guys on the 11 crew, I’d feel bad not being able to prepare to the best of my ability,” Heim said. “Showing up to the racetrack not being prepared? I’d kind of feel guilty, honestly.”
That’s not swagger. That’s accountability.
So, yeah. Corey Heim is the 2025 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series champion. That’s the headline. But that’s not the story he was really writing.
The story is that after two straight years of leaving Phoenix with a knot in his throat, he showed up to the same place, with the same expectations, and decided he wasn’t leaving empty-handed again.
He put it on his own shoulders, told everybody around him to trust him, grabbed third gear on the apron, and drove through the pressure like it wasn’t allowed to exist.
“It was meant to be,” he said.
And for once, in Phoenix, it actually was.
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