Connor Zilisch had exactly the amount of time he needed to run down his best friend, Jesse Love, to score the win in Saturday’s NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series Mission 200 at The Glen at Watkins Glen International — even if it looked at several points that he didn’t.
Race Results: Mission 200 at The Glen
“Yeah, that was driving as hard as I could for all 30 of those laps,” Zilisch said after the race.
Love, who found the race lead in the closing laps through a strategy call from crew chief Danny Stockman Jr., which left him with a dwindling fuel load, saw his massive lead over Zilisch shrink from 15-plus seconds to within 1.6 seconds with six laps to go.
However, this is when Zilisch, who had a far superior car, stepped over the line as he was passing through the bus stop.
Zilisch, attempting to chop more time off of Love’s lead, clipped the curbing in the bus stop, which sent him wide on the right-hand exit turn, and as he drove off wide, the right front corner of his car dipped into the grass.
Due to massive rain over the last week at Watkins Glen International, Zilisch’s car sank into the mud, and the right front corner of his car dug into the Earth. The right side of his splitter would rip off and get lodged underneath his right front tire.
It looked like Love would be safe for the remainder of the race. However, over the next couple of laps, Zilisch adjusted his driving, and the chunk of splitter got dislodged, which allowed Zilisch to regain his pace.
On the final lap of the race, Love still looked to have an insurmountable lead, but when the pair of drivers reached the bus stop portion of the lap, Zilisch gained on him intensely. From there, Zilisch would reel Love in the remainder of the lap, and as the two drivers went into the final turn, Love made an error, washed wide, and that gave Zilisch the room he needed to scoot by for his third consecutive NASCAR O’Reilly Series race win at The Glen.
“I wasn’t going to move Jesse in that last corner, there, but he got in deep, and I was able to get by,” Zilisch explained. “But, yeah, man, it’s so cool to come back and get my third win at Watkins Glen in a row with JRM.”
This win, the 13th of Zilisch’s O’Reilly Series career, comes one year after the driver suffered a broken collarbone in victory lane in this event a season ago. Zilisch was able to make it through the celebratory process cleanly this year.
For Love, it was a heartbreaking finish.
“When you really nickel and dime it, right, there’s a hundred little small mistakes that let him get close. At the end of the day, the glaring piece of it is that I had a bad corner,” an emotional Love said after the race. “I had a bad corner.”
Taylor Gray would finish third, and first in class, essentially, behind the battle between Zilisch and Love.
Ross Chastain came home with a fourth-place finish, while Brandon Jones came to life in the closing laps and snagged a fifth-place finish.
Brent Crews, who won Stage 1 and led a race-high 32 laps, faded with a vibration in the closing laps, but still managed a sixth-place result. With the solid run, Crews, who missed four races early in the season due to age restrictions, is now inside the top-12 of the championship standings, and is in position to make the Chase.
Parker Retzlaff, Shane van Gisbergen, Austin Green, and Justin Allgaier rounded out the top-10 finishers.
With the top-10 run, Allgaier was able to strengthen his series points lead, as Sheldon Creed, the second-place man in the championship standings, went flying into the air after an excursion with the bus stop grass, and would finish 29th, one lap down.
