Dale Earnhardt Jr. placed the blame on Connor Zilisch for the Shane van Gisbergen wreck, questioning what he's got in the young driver.
The battle everyone predicted came to pass late in the Xfinity Series race at Watkins Glen on Saturday. It was the wonder kid, Connor Zilisch, against the road course warrior, Shane van Gisbergen.
But the battle didn’t quite materialize. Instead, Zilisch got into van Gisbergen going into a turn with about 15 laps to go and wrecked him.
The two drivers, teammates at the time racing for JR Motorsports, wouldn’t battle it out to the finish line. That left owner Dale Earnhardt Jr. less than enthused, despite Connor Zilisch going on to claim the win.
“Connor coming back on the track and clipping him was avoidable,” Earnhardt said, breaking down the wreck on the Dale Jr. Download. “[SVG]’s shading left to make the entrance for Turn 7 and Connor’s options into Turn 7 (limited). He’s doing that and he had been doing this for many laps, to try to make it hard for Connor to get around. And he’s doing it again. And Connor didn’t cut him a break.
“Connor could have lifted. Connor could have got back behind. There’s 15 laps in the race to go. This is like a last lap, last corner move. And there were so many laps left in the race. And we would have been gifted more laps of these two guys trying to battle.”
There are two schools of thought to the whole thing. Well, at least.
Earnhardt honed in on one of them: van Gisbergen is a heck of a defensive driver, and with 15 laps to go, Connor Zilisch may have been growing frustrated. So he just went for it.
“I would say that that wreck was a result of them going lap, corner after corner after corner, and getting a little more and more aggressive with — I wouldn’t call what SVG was doing as blocking — he was just really trying to take away opportunity and line,” Earnhardt said. “He never threw like a Daytona, Talladega block, but he knows how to shade down the straightaway or be in a spot that makes really Connor’s options limited. He is very good. Very good.”
Van Gisbergen was at a bit of a tire disadvantage at the time, having stayed out late in Stage 2 for track position. The thinking by most analysts was that Connor Zilisch could have passed van Gisbergen in the closing stretch without too much fuss.
For Earnhardt, the real question is who Zilisch is as a driver. Even he’s not entirely sure yet. Was it inexperience showing in the wreck? Or was it something else entirely?
“We don’t know everything about Connor,” Earnhardt said. “We don’t know how Connor keeps score, right, in his head. This may just be who Connor Zilisch is. Right? This might not be a young guy, inexperienced, making mistakes. This may be Connor saying, ‘You block, you pay.’ That also might be the case, where we might actually be realizing how he’s willing to stand his ground in moments like this, even against a teammate.
“I don’t like it, right? I don’t like the 9 car getting destroyed. I want SVG to have a great experience driving our cars. I want SVG to want to do it again. Man, any car owner would love to have this guy behind the wheel of your car at the road courses.”
Category: General Sports
