On April 26 at Talladega Superspeedway, Connor Zilisch was leading on the final lap when contact with Jesse Love sent him spinning hard into the backstretch inside wall. He suffered a minor back injury, and would miss the following race at Texas Motor Speedway.
Since his return, his finishes are as follows: 2nd, 2nd, 5th, 1st, 4th, 2nd, 1st, 1st, 1st. Oh, and by the way, he just turned 19 years old.
Special doesn't even begin to describe it.
Connor Zilisch isn't the "next" anyone; he's the first Connor Zilisch
At this point, there's a case to be made that NASCAR has never seen another prospect as promising as Zilisch. He was originally touted as a road racing ace, and immediately delivered in that regard, winning his Xfinity Series debut at Watkins Glen International last summer.
This year at Sonoma Raceway, he did something the entire Cup Series field has failed to do in three of four tries on road courses: beat Shane van Gisbergen.
The only question was whether or not his talent would translate to ovals, and not only has he silenced any doubts, but he's on par with some of the best teen prospects in NASCAR history.
Perhaps his closest comparison, given his age and race team, is Chase Elliott, who in 2014 won three times to capture the Xfinity Series title as an 18-year-old rookie. Following his Brickyard win on Saturday, Zilisch has already matched that number on ovals alone.
Given the fact that there are three more road courses on the Xfinity Series schedule, and the fact that he has now proven himself more than capable on ovals, it wouldn't be surprising for Zilisch to flirt with double-digit wins by the end of the season.
Other prospects in NASCAR's secondary series have had knockout campaigns in the win column, such as Christopher Bell in 2019, Chase Briscoe in 2020, and Noah Gragson in 2022, but all of them were well into their twenties with multiple seasons under their belts.
What Zilisch is doing at 19 – and again, barely 19 – is not normal. This is a driver who spent his earlier teen years competing in European karting academies in pursuit of climbing the Formula ladder. When (not if) he reaches Cup Series stardom, he will likely face questions about whether he should try leaving the series for F1.
There has never been another prospect in NASCAR history for whom it's a more surefire guarantee that he will leave a series-changing impact on the sport, and one could even say he's doing it already.
After Jeff Gordon took the NASCAR world by storm in the 1990s, every Cup team wanted to find the "next Gordon". When Joey Logano came along, he similarly inspired a new trend of prospects who were groomed from adolescence on development deals with major organizations.
With the future Trackhouse Racing star, the evolution of NASCAR's development process has now taken a whole new turn. For years, perhaps decades to come, teams will be trying to find "the next Connor Zilisch".