It doesn’t matter what unfolds during Saturday’s NASCAR Xfinity Series Championship Race at Phoenix Raceway; Connor Zilisch is moving onwards and upwards in 2026, jumping into the NASCAR Cup Series with Trackhouse Racing.
The 19-year-old driver has done more than enough to earn that opportunity in just his rookie campaign alone; between a regular-season championship in the NASCAR Xfinity Series (which came after missing a race), an incredible 10 victories, and the longest top-five streak in the history of the second-tier series.
Zilisch has literally put his blood, sweat, and tears into trying to win the Xfinity Series title for JR Motorsports, and now, it all comes down to this. Fighting through a broken collarbone and an undisclosed back injury from a wreck at Talladega, the Mooresville, North Carolina-native has surged to phenom status, and rightfully so.
“Yeah, this weekend is a big weekend for me. We’ve done a lot this year, but it all means nothing if we don’t perform on Saturday. So, there’s definitely a lot of added pressure because of that,” Zilisch said on Thursday.
To win the ultimate prize that the NASCAR Xfinity Series has to offer, Zilisch has to be the highest finisher of the four Championship 4 drivers, which includes two of his JR Motorsports teammates, Justin Allgaier and Carson Kvapil, as well as his best friend, Jesse Love.
When the season got started at Daytona in February, Zilisch, just like everybody else watching on, wasn’t exactly sure how his rookie campaign in the Xfinity Series would even go. Even before then, being a Trackhouse development driver and assessing their driver situation at the time, there were questions of whether 2025 would be a one-and-done in the second-tier series.
“I knew early on that the speed was there, but I didn’t know if I, myself, was going to be able to put it all together. It’s really hard to do. Especially as a rookie, racing against guys, who are really talented and have been doing this for a long time,” Zilisch added. “Justin [Allgaier] is very experienced, and I never knew if I was going to be able to put races together as well as him to be able to win this many.”
At the start of the season, things started off rather questionable. While the 19-year-old driver had shown speed, the finishes weren’t necessarily there. Through the first 11 events of the season, Zilisch had one top-five and three top-10 finishes, but Talladega was a major turning point.
Zilisch was leading the race at Talladega on the final lap when contact from Jesse Love spun the No. 88 down the racetrack and hard into the inside SAFER Barrier. The rookie driver was then forced to sit out the following weekend at Texas, due to an injury in his back, but coming back from that injury, something must have clicked (no pun intended).
Coming back from that injury, Zilisch (literally) went on the longest streak of top-five finishes that the NASCAR Xfinity Series has ever seen, and turned a questionable rookie campaign into one of the best to ever exist.
That rally, which saw him go from sixth in regular-season point standings to winning the Regular Season Championship by the time the postseason was set to begin, earned him a ton of Playoff Points and made his path to the Championship 4 rather easy.
Zilisch still had his struggles throughout the year, though, like Watkins Glen, where, after winning the Xfinity Series event, the 19-year-old fell off his racecar and onto the ground, breaking his collarbone. The following week at Daytona, the future superstar started the race and eventually handed the controls to Parker Kligerman, who went to Victory Lane on his behalf.
You can’t fake speed, you can’t fake raw talent, and you certainly can’t fake tenacity, and Connor Zilisch has three, but is it enough to cap off a historic season with a NASCAR Xfinity Series Championship?
The NASCAR Xfinity Series Championship Race at Phoenix Raceway will take place on Saturday, November 1, at 7:30 PM ET on The CW, Motor Racing Network, and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio Channel 90.
