Heading into Friday night’s NASCAR Xfinity Series Food City 300 at Bristol Motor Speedway, Sheldon Creed had 14 career second-place finishes. On the final lap of the race, Creed drove like a driver hell-bent on breaking through for his first-career win.
Creed worked over his Hass Factory Team teammate Sam Mayer for the runner-up spot coming to the white flag, and he immediately went to work to chase down race leader Aric Almirola.
The driver of the No. 00 Ford Mustang Dark Horse was able to close the gap and put himself in a position to try one last-ditch dive into Turns 3 and 4. But try as he might, Creed couldn’t get up alongside Almirola in Turns 3 and 4, and Almirola powered off the final corner to pick up his second win of the 2025 NASCAR Xfinity Series season.
Race Results: Food City 300 at Bristol
With the win, Almirola, who made his 12th start of the season on Friday night, has advanced the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing team into the Round of 8 of the NASCAR Xfinity Series Owner Championship Playoffs.
Almirola gained the lead by choosing to flip pit strategies to get off sequence from Connor Zilisch and the No. 88 team. He felt doing something different from Zilisch would give his No. 19 team the best chance at a victory. He was right.
“Yeah, I’ve just been tired of getting beat by those guys. I figured I’d try my chances with the lead,” Almirola explained in a post-race interview on The CW. “They’ve been so fast, and they fire off so fast on new tires. I just didn’t think I could beat them straight up on new tires. It took me about 20 laps to get going, so, I thought my best chance was to stay out on old tires.”
For Creed, the career runner-up finishes tally has reached 15. The driver, who is still on a quest for his first career NASCAR Xfinity Series win, said he did all he could in the final Turn to give him a shot to make the win come to fruition.
“I got to my teammate, and went to the bottom, and maybe I should have gone to the bottom five laps earlier. And maybe I would have been that much closer to [Almirola]. I kind of shipped it in there in [Turns] 3 and 4, kind of knowing I wasn’t going to get there,” Creed explained. “Yeah, I tried to make it — I don’t know. I knew I wasn’t going to spook him, and maybe, I don’t know, if he would have lifted or if I could have got next to him, I don’t know if something would have happened, but yeah, just rallied all night.”
Mayer held on to a third-place finish, which allowed Haas Factory Team to get its NASCAR Xfinity Series Playoffs push off to a great start with a pair of top-three finishes.
Carson Kvapil would finish fourth, and he’d be followed across the finish line by his teammate Connor Zilisch.
Zilisch, who led a race-high 98 laps and won Stage 2, nabbed his 15th consecutive top-five finish, which is an all-time NASCAR Xfinity Series record. Zilisch, who came into this race on a four-race winning streak, has an average finish of 2.133 over his last 15 starts. The regular season points champion will head into the second race of the round, which will be held at Kansas Speedway, 85 points above the Playoff cutline.
Polesitter, Justin Allgaier, would lead 95 laps on the night and would win Stage 1 before settling for a sixth-place finish.
Harrison Burton, Christian Eckes, Jeremy Clements, and Brennan Poole rounded out the top-10 finishers in Friday night’s race.
While the majority of the 12-driver NASCAR Xfinity Series field had a solid evening, it was rough sledding for three drivers in the championship fight.
Austin Hill, who came into the race as the No. 12 seed, came home with a disappointing 19th-place finish, while his Richard Childress Racing teammate Jesse Love faltered with a 25th-place result after being involved in an early-race incident. And Sammy Smith came home 37th after the engine in his No. 8 JR Motorsports Chevrolet expired after 56 laps.
Not the way @sammysmithSS wanted to start the #XfinitySeries Playoffs as he's done for the night. pic.twitter.com/a7Jc1LqNNu
— The CW Sports (@TheCW_Sports) September 13, 2025
Here is the NASCAR Xfinity Series Playoff Grid Following Bristol:
- Connor Zilisch, +85 points to cutline
- Justin Allgaier, +53
- Sam Mayer, +35
- Carson Kvapil, +16
- Harrison Burton, +9
- Brandon Jones, +8
- Sheldon Creed, +7
- Taylor Gray, +3
- Nick Sanchez, -3
- Jesse Love, -3
- Austin Hill, -16
- Sammy Smith, -24
Next up for the NASCAR Xfinity Series is the Kansas Lottery 300 at Kansas Speedway on Saturday, September 27. That race will be televised on The CW, and coverage is set to kick off at 4:00 PM ET. The Motor Racing Network (MRN) and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio will carry the radio broadcast of that race.
