What a difference a year makes. The rookie season in the Cup Series for Connor Zilisch in 2026, compared to his rookie season in the O’Reilly Series in 2025, cannot be more poles apart. While last year he was winning races left, right, and center, this year, a result outside of the top 10 has come as a sigh of relief for the young Trackhouse driver.

Connor Zilisch credits the positive result at Darlington to keeping his ears open

In the first six races of the season, Connor Zilisch has secured two finishes inside the top 20, two inside the top 30, and two outside the top 30. By no means has his rookie season lived up to the hype and highs of his breakthrough season last year.

However, his 18th-place result on Sunday was a relief to him, especially after his 29th and 32nd-place finishes at Phoenix and Las Vegas. When asked how he feels about his result at Darlington, Connor Zilisch said, “A lot of it’s just me getting better and building and continuing to get better each week with my feedback and what I’m doing on restarts to put myself in a position to stay on the lead lap.”

He claimed he’s excited about the momentum he has and the work his team is doing to improve the cars. Zilisch hopes to place his and his teammate’s cars in better positions as the season progresses. Talking about managing tire fall-off, which is new for him as a race car driver, Connor Zilisch said he pushed hard on the short runs to maintain his track position, but he was also careful not to ‘kill it’ and feel exhausted at the end of the stint.

So, it’s a balancing act for him to figure that out, especially when making up track position is so difficult if other drivers have equal tires around him.

Zilisch is having ‘one of those years’ in 2026

Ahead of his 32nd-place finish at Las Vegas, which put him 34th in the standings, Connor Zilisch opened up on the state of his rookie season. He admitted to Bob Pockrass that he’d had ‘a rough stretch of weeks’ with incidents that were out of his control.

“As a race car driver, I have a hard time saying it’s bad luck when it’s four weeks in a row. I definitely need to do a better job putting myself in positions where I’m not gonna get wrecked all the time. This past week, I had a pretty incident-free race other than my incident with Ricky Stenhouse Jr. and Ryan Preece, and then that rotor exploded,” he elaborated.

Zilisch claimed his rookie season has been one of those years where he is knocked down. And no matter how many times he tries to get up or fight back, he keeps getting knocked down.

With that said, it’ll be interesting to see if his positive result at Darlington breaks him out of the loop of being knocked down. Zilisch and his team would be hoping he bounces back in the next few races as NASCAR heads to the short tracks of Martinsville and Bristol next.