Meet Connor Zilisch, Racing's Next Superstar
At barely 19 years old, this prodigy has turned the NASCAR Xfinity Series into his own personal showcase. What can he do next?
No matter the sport, fans are always chasing the Next Big Thing. We crave greatness — and there’s nothing quite like the excitement of seeing it early on, then being able to look back later and say, “I knew them when.”
That obsession is at the heart of our constant searches for future GOATs. But the flip-side of all that hype is our tendency to turn on prodigies when they fall short. Expectations become a curse, inevitably leading to disappointment and backlash. As the opening line of Moneyball says:
“Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.”
In the face of that tug-of-war between buildup and letdown, it often pays to be more measured, reserving judgment until an athlete builds their résumé organically. But sometimes the evidence is too overwhelming to ignore — and such seems to be the case with racing phenom Connor Zilisch, whose body of work is expanding so rapidly, and at such a young age, that future stardom feels less like speculation and more like an inevitability.
Zilisch turned 19 exactly a week ago, and he celebrated it Sunday by winning his third consecutive NASCAR Xfinity Series race at arguably the most famous racetrack in the world, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Zilisch currently leads the Xfinity Series — one rung below the Cup Series on the ladder of stock-car importance and prestige — in wins (with five) during this, his rookie season on the top feeder circuit. This is in spite of being the second-youngest driver in the series: only William Sawalich (who was born 73 days later) is younger, but Sawalich has zero wins and one Top 5 finish to Zilisch’s five wins and 10 Top 5s, despite running one more race.
Oh, and did I mention that in February, Zilisch (at 18 years and 223 days old) became the youngest driver to make his Cup Series debut since Joey Logano appeared at age 18 years and 114 days in 2008? That was a pretty big deal, considering Logano is maybe the most prototypical example of a precocious young hotshot driver hitting the NASCAR scene in the sport’s history. And for what it’s worth, Zilisch had a higher Driver Rating (55.7) in his Cup debut than Logano, the future three-time series champion, had in his (31.8).
With five wins already, Zilisch is tied with Greg Biffle and Carl Edwards for the second-most ever in an Xfinity Series1 season by a driver in his first season with five or more races at this level. (Essentially, a proxy for “rookie” status — Zilisch is a current Xfinity rookie despite running four races at the level last year, winning once.) The only such “rookie” with more wins in a season was Jack Ingram in 1982, and that’s only because 1982 was the inaugural season of the Xfinity Series.
Toss out the 45-year-old Ingram and the rest of those 1982 debuts, and Zilisch is having as much of a winning rookie season as anyone in the series’ history — and he’s doing it at as young an age as we’ve seen as well. The only other 18-year-old rookies who won even three times were future Cup Series champ Chase Elliott and current playoff contender Ty Gibbs. Gibbs (now age 22) hasn’t won a Cup race yet, but he did just win the first-ever NASCAR In-Season Challenge bracket for $1 million.
More than just the basic numbers, though, Zilisch’s rising star rides upon how he’s been able to win all those races, too.
His background is in road-racing, and despite being from North Carolina — as NASCAR as it gets — he spent a number of his formative years driving in Europe in competitions such as the FIA Karting Academy, which produced future Formula 1 driver Charles Leclerc (among others). Zilisch came back to the U.S. when NASCAR’s feeder programs offered more financial support, though he’s said he still dreams of driving in F1 someday.
Zilisch has certainly shown tremendous aptitude on the twisty tracks already. He has 11 career wins (again, as a teenager!) combined across the Mazda MX-5 Cup and the IMSA SportsCar Championship, both of which drive exclusively on road and/or street courses. And he’s carried that form over to stock cars as well: In 7 total road-course starts across all three national NASCAR series (Cup, Xfinity and Trucks), Zilisch has 3 wins — good for a 42.9 percent win rate — and 6 Top-5 finishes (85.7 percent rate) with an average Driver Rating of 121.8. (For reference, the field average rating is always roughly 70.)
Moreover, he has proven to be just about the only driver in America who can go head-to-head with Shane van Gisbergen at a road/street course and actually beat the man who might be the greatest road-racer in NASCAR history. On the streets of Chicago last month, the pair tangled hard before SVG passed Zilisch on the final restart of the race, but Zilisch got his revenge the very next week, outdueling SVG at Sonoma in a thrilling battle:
That was the first in Zilisch’s current stretch of three consecutive Xfinity Series race wins, making him the youngest driver to ever accomplish that feat — he’s a full 2 years, 10 months and 12 days younger than the previous record-holder, Austin Cindric, was when he did it. And it made sense that Zilisch would spark a winning streak on those road courses he’s so good at. But then, the second leg of the streak took place at Dover — a mile-long, steep concrete oval — and the third happened at Indy, a long, flat rectangular box of a track that tests a completely different driving skill set.
Sure, the Dover race may have carried an asterisk: Zilisch’s victory came as he was ahead when rain caused the rest of race to be abandoned, leaving the then 18-year-old as the winner. But at Indy, the late-race pressure was as high as it gets, and he had to use his full array of oval skills to make a green-flag pass against Taylor Gray on the penultimate lap of the race, then hold off the field for 2.5 more miles before claiming victory:
The big knock on NASCAR’s resident road-course ringers is that they can’t compete anywhere else. And even van Gisbergen, for all his brilliance on tracks with both left- and right-hand turns, has struggled a great deal on other track types. While it might seem like racing is just racing, the skills, tactics and muscle memory required on different track types are so distinct that road-racing and oval-racing can feel like entirely different sports.
And based on his background, it wouldn’t have been surprising if Zilisch exceled on road circuits but was nothing special on ovals. But instead, he has a career Driver Rating over 100 at regular ovals — for context, Kyle Larson (arguably NASCAR’s most talented driver) has an average rating of 99.9 in the Cup Series on ovals in 2025 — and he’s rated as well above average (87.5) at short tracks and drafting tracks, despite not winning a race at one of those yet.
In other words, in Zilisch we have a kid who’s barely 19, is off to the fastest statistical start in the history of NASCAR’s top feeder series, is able to drive toe-to-toe on road courses against the best road-course racer in the sport’s history — something basically nobody else can consistently do — plus is winning races at a 20 percent clip on ovals and is well above average at each possible track type on the schedule.
Zilisch also comes from a family of athletes (his mother was a high-level gymnast) and seems to be mature beyond his years. He’s being mentored by Dale Earnhardt Jr., who came out of the pressure-cooker of sharing a name with the sport’s biggest star to have a Hall of Fame career as a driver and become even more respected as a commentator and team owner. (Zilisch’s win at Indy was the 100th all-time for Earnhardt’s team, JR Motorsports.)
So the support structure is there for Zilisch to thrive as a full-time Cup Series driver when he inevitably makes that leap. (Rumors say it will happen next season, with Daniel Suárez now on the outs at Trackhouse Racing.)
The measured side of our brains should remember that phenoms don’t make a splash right away, and that a driver’s journey isn’t always linear — just look at Gibbs, who was hyped only somewhat less than Zilisch as a teen but has taken a number of years to acclimate to Cup, and is still searching for consistency and improvement. But of all the “chosen ones” we’ve built up as young prospects over the years — from LeBron James and Wemby in the NBA to Sidney Crosby and Connor McDavid in the NHL, Andrew Luck and Trevor Lawrence in the NFL, Caitlin Clark in the WNBA, and Bryce Harper or Paul Skenes in baseball — Zilisch sure looks like NASCAR’s version of that.
I don’t know if he’ll ever get the chance to duke it out with Oscar Piastri, Lando Norris and Max Verstappen on the F1 grid — never say never!2 — but in American racing, it’s been a long time since a young driver came along with this much potential. In a sports world where true greatness is always sought but rarely found, fans might one day look back on Zilisch’s rise right now and be able to say: I knew him when.
Filed under: NASCAR
Or before that, the Nationwide Series, Busch Series or any of the many names that this series once went by.
Mario Andretti, for instance, was an American who won NASCAR races while also becoming an F1 and IndyCar series champion. That might be the legacy Zilisch is chasing.