Corey Heim had a car that was probably better than the 15th-place finish he earned at Kansas Speedway back in April. But the 23-year-old struggled to figure out where to put his car on the track, how to run the wall, and take risks that might have helped him gain some positions.
Afterward, Heim was pulled aside by 23XI Racing senior director of competition Dave Rogers. The feedback became a lightbulb moment.
"He was like, 'Hey, man, I don't want you to wreck our cars or anything, but it's OK if you take these bigger risks and learn,'" Heim recalled to ESPN. "'No one is going to think poorly of you if you hit a wall or do this or that to hinder the result because you took those risks. We want you to be ready for 2027 and learn from mistakes.' I feel like I've been thinking about that a lot, in regard to my decision-making and my mindset throughout a race.
"It's not as much about results as it is learning and being prepared to be full-time next year."
On May 30, 23XI Racing made it official: Heim will be in its third car next season, the No. 35, alongside Tyler Reddick and Bubba Wallace. It is a long-awaited, well-deserved -- and expected -- promotion for Heim, who won the Craftsman Truck Series championship in 2025 in a record season (12 wins, 21 top-10 finishes in 25 starts).
He is not running full-time this season. There was no use in running more Truck Series events after earning 21 wins over the three seasons he ran from 2023 to 2025. The change in pace doesn't faze Heim, who has experienced this before in his racing career, with part-time schedules in ARCA and then Trucks before ever getting his full-time opportunity.
Instead, this year is a notebook year, as Rogers pointed out. Heim will run 12 races in the Cup Series, has already run five in the Truck Series (with three more wins), is consistently on the simulator, and does the wheel-force testing for Toyota. All of which is helping Heim fill his notebook ahead of 2027, and the gaps in between races also give him more time to break down how they played out and study, instead of having to immediately jump into the next race week.
"I'm pretty much as involved as a full-time driver [would be]," Heim said. "I'm basically in every single meeting. I don't sit in on the debriefs on the races that I don't run, but the prep side of things, our meetings to look over previous races, I'll be in those meetings. I work out there every day, and I do the simulator two or three times a week. I pretty much prepare as if I'm a full-time driver in case something happens to one of their guys and I have to sub in at the last second. I think that's the vision they had for me from the beginning as well."
Heim has always been destined for the Cup Series, but it was a matter of when, and some expected it to be far sooner than 2027. But he always knew the first opportunity he would have to get into the Cup Series full-time was in '27, as long as his development continued to progress and he produced results.
The first time Heim ran a Cup Series car was in 2023 at Dover and Kansas, filling in for an injured Erik Jones. 23XI Racing then gave him a start later that year at Nashville. And at that time, Heim felt his future was "years away, so long." But now it seems like it happened yesterday.
"It's crazy to think it's around the corner now," Heim said. "It hasn't felt like forever as I originally thought it was going to be, but I've kept myself busy, and that's been the game changer for me. They found a schedule where I can consistently stay busy and race most weekends. It's really flown by."
Toyota learned the Heim name back in 2017-2018, when he was running late models against their drivers. It became natural to follow his success as Heim added ARCA Menards Series races to his resume and continued his late-model program. By 2019, as Toyota looked for its next driver, Heim's potential was intriguing.
He ran a seven-race ARCA schedule in 2020 with Venturini Motorsports and Toyota support. The manufacturer signed Heim and let him know that if the trial run went well, there could be bigger opportunities. It did, and there were. Heim ended up full-time in the series in 2021 and won six times, which quickly led Toyota to look at the Truck Series for him.
"We knew he had a lot of potential," Trent Rodriguez, manager of driver development for Toyota Racing Development (TRD), told ESPN. "We knew he was very good, but I would say once he started getting into trucks, we really got a clear idea of where you're at ... and that's when you start to realize, 'OK, this can be a little more serious,' or 'We've got to figure this out for the future.'"
Along the way, Heim has done all the right things to grow and be ready for the next step. Although he is described as shockingly quiet, Heim isn't afraid to seek out help from those with more experience, and his work ethic is noticeable to all around him.
He doesn't make the same mistake twice. Rodriguez recalled a Truck Series race at Pocono Raceway in which Heim was bested by Kyle Busch, who "made him look silly" on the final lap. A year later, Heim was in a similar situation and won. There was also a Truck race at Texas Motor Speedway, again featuring Busch, from whom Heim took lessons.
"He is ... so serious about his preparation, the questions that he asks," TRD president Tyler Gibbs told ESPN. "From that perspective, what he learned from Kyle [Busch] when he was racing Kyle and constantly asking Denny [Hamlin] questions, all of those things show his desire to compete and get better."
Hamlin noticed Heim for the first time a number of years ago, too. Driver to driver, it wasn't the speed or the results, but Heim's race craft that stood out. Heim is a generational talent, in Hamlin's opinion, and he knew he needed to get him to 23XI Racing. It was similar, Hamlin said, to how he felt about pursuing Reddick.
As the next chapter of his career approaches, Heim could not have painted a better picture for how his development over the last few years has gone. There were opportunities for him to get into a Cup Series car with another team before now, but 23XI Racing felt like home, and he put his patience to the test.
And soon, that patience of getting to the Cup Series will be tested in a new way. No driver is ever prepared for the top level of NASCAR, but for Heim, he's done as much as he can to be ready to take on the challenge.
"I don't think there is anything better to prepare you than going out and doing it," Heim said. "So, of course, I would like to run more races, but at the same time, I think this strategy that we have running these 12 races on top of the testing and [everything else], is a good, healthy schedule for me.
"Again, nothing beats actually doing it and going racing in a Cup car, but I think from a development side and a non-full-time side, this is probably the best way to do it, in my opinion."
