The Championship 4 for the NASCAR Xfinity Series is set for Saturday’s season finale at Phoenix (7:30 p.m. ET, The CW, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio), and we know anything can happen when it all comes down to one race. For instance, the last time the series raced here back in March, Aric Almirola took advantage of a late caution and outdueled Justin Allgaier and Alex Bowman on the restart — the latter with a little shove up into the fence — to win by less than five-hundredths of a second. This track is designed so daring passes and desperate dive-bombs are never very far away.
But even though each Champ 4 driver — whether it be Allgaier, Connor Zilisch, Carson Kvapil or Jesse Love — has to execute, avoid chaos and get the job done this weekend, it would be surprising if anyone other than Zilisch emerged as this season’s Xfinity champion.
The 19-year-old phenom has been nothing less than historically dominant in 2025, winning a series-high 10 races — more than double anyone else in the field — with eight poles, 19 top fives, 22 top 10s and an average finish of 8.2 in 31 races. Zilisch became just the third driver to earn double-digit wins in an Xfinity season (joining all-time series wins leader Kyle Busch, four times, and Sam Ard from 1983), and he did it on not only his patented road courses — COTA, Sonoma, Watkins Glen, Portland and the Charlotte Roval — but also ovals — Pocono, Dover, Indy and Gateway — and even a superspeedway — Daytona — for good measure.
According to the Adjusted Points+ index, which rates the quality of each driver’s per-race finishes (with increasing bonuses for wins and other high placements) relative to a field average of 100, Zilisch — at 279, or 179% better than average — is trying to cap off the most dominant single season by a non-Buschwhacker in the history of the Xfinity Series:
The only real close competition for Zilisch is Ard, who finished second in the very first Xfinity (then the Late Model Sportsman) Series in 1982 behind Jack Ingram, then rattled off a dominant championship campaign in 1983 and was even better in 1984, when he was the only driver to be 170 percent better than average until Zilisch came along this season.
Yes, we’ve seen even more absurdly dominant campaigns by full-time Cup drivers who used Xfinity for extra seat time, like when Busch won 10 of the 17 races he entered in 2016. But arguably, there hasn’t been an Xfinity Series regular as good as Zilisch this year. And did we mention he only turned 19 in the middle of the season, on July 22?
The combination of being this great, this soon, has fueled talk that Zilisch might be the greatest prospect in the history of the sport. And it’s not unfounded. Here’s a plot of Adjusted Points+ index versus age (as of July 1 during the season in question) for all primary Xfinity Series drivers with at least 15 starts in a season, all-time:
This really helps put in perspective how incredible what Zilisch has done this season is. In the top left-hand side of the chart, where young greatness resides, the only dots even remotely in the same neighborhood as Zilisch belong to Ty Gibbs — who had an Adjusted Points+ index of 233 at age 18.7 on July 1 of 2021, then improved to 237 at age 19.7 in 2022. Zilisch was age 18.9 on July 1, 2025 — slightly older than Gibbs was in 2021 — but his 279 Adjusted Points+ was significantly better than either Gibbs campaign.
And that’s as close as any other young driver has ever gotten to Zilisch’s current level. Other notables like Joey Logano and Chase Elliott were only around 200 on the Adjusted Points+ scale, slightly younger than Zilisch is now — which helped signify their future potential as champion drivers! — while a slightly older future champion, Kyle Busch, graded out at 219 in the 2004 season. Even Jeff Gordon, maybe the platonic ideal of a “young gun” driver in NASCAR history, never had an Xfinity season all that close to Zilisch’s 2025, even at older ages.
Of course, Gordon made up for it once he hit the Cup level, coming out with the two best under-25 seasons in history by Adjusted Points+ in 1995 (253) and 1996 (276), becoming the youngest driver in the modern era to win a championship in the first of those seasons. That’s the legacy Zilisch will be chasing as a full-time Cup driver for Trackhouse Racing starting next season, and there will no doubt be growing pains as he adjusts to life in the new car, series and higher level of competition.
But as we noted around his Cup debut back in March, Zilisch is on a historic track for his age in terms of how old a driver was when appearing in their first race at the series’ top level. At 18 years and 223 days old when he started at Circuit of The Americas, Zilisch became the youngest driver to hit the track in Cup since Joey “Sliced Bread” Logano did it at 18 years and 113 days in September 2008 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. And to find a younger driver than Joey, you’d need to go back to Darryl Sage in July 1982, who drove for his father Lee’s team at Nashville at 17 years and 62 days old — establishing himself as the youngest driver to appear in a race in all of NASCAR’s modern Cup Series era (since 1972):
These are all imperfect measures of perceived potential, of course. For every Logano or Ricky Rudd, who debuted even younger than Zilisch did, there’s Bobby Hillin, Jr. — who had a long journeyman Cup career at best — or plenty of other drivers who barely stuck around at all — Sage only appeared in eight Cup races, after all.
Likewise, our chart of the best young Xfinity prospects also includes Gibbs (whose improvements have come only in fits and starts over three-and-a-half seasons in Cup), Trevor Bayne (who never won another race after taking the 2011 Daytona 500), Reed Sorenson (who became a journeyman after his early promise with Chip Ganassi fizzled), Harrison Burton (who lost his Cup ride with the Wood Brothers last year) and Brian Vickers (whose career was limited by health problems). Early returns — particularly in a lower-tier series — are no guarantee of lasting success.
Ultimately, Zilisch will be judged on what he does in a Cup car, just like Gordon, Logano, Elliott, Busch and every other hot prospect who came before him. But just the same, seasons like this one don’t come around too often. By every available measure — production, precocity and potential — Zilisch has already set a standard no prospect before him quite reached. Win or lose on Saturday, if Zilisch’s Xfinity Series campaign is any indication, the sport might be watching the arrival of a truly special generational talent behind the wheel.
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