Connor Zilisch Clinches Xfinity Series Regular Season Championship With St. Louis Win

Connor Zilisch made it look easy again.

The JR Motorsports driver clinched the Xfinity Series regular season championship with a dominant win at World Wide Technology Raceway. It was his fourth consecutive win and ninth of the season.

Zilisch won Stage One, led 121 of 160 laps and wasn’t challenged much at the end he beat William Sawalich across the line by 1.506 following a restart with 11 laps to go. Christian Eckes, Brandon Jones and Jesse Love rounded out the top five.

“This is gonna be tough to keep up, honestly, you know, it’s rare that you can go on a run like this and every week I show up thinking, ‘man this is the weekend that we just go run eighth and just aren’t great,’ but every weekend we show up and we’re a winning race car and my pit crew executes and my team executes and everybody does their job and we end up doing burnouts on the front stretch,” Zilisch said during his post-race interview on the CW.

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The burnout almost went very badly this time, as he skidded dangerously close to a photographer on the track, but didn’t hit him.

Justin Allgaier, Zilisch’s teammate and closest points rival, won Stage Two, but was sent to the back of the field for a pit lane speeding penalty and then got caught up in a multi-car accident. He finished 28th, which was good to secure second in the points standings.

Here are the 12 drivers that qualified for the playoffs:

1. Connor Zilisch +59 above the first cutline

2. Justin Allgaier +30

3. Sam Mayer +11

4. Jesse Love +8

5. Brandon Jones +8

6. Sammy Smith +4

7. Nick Sanchez +1

8. Taylor Gray +0

———-

9. Carson Kvapil -0

10. Sheldon Creed -2

11. Harrison Burton -3

12. Austin Hill -5