The competition eventually solved it for him but Connor Zilisch was having a leisurely uneventful drive on Saturday in the Xfinity Series race at Portland.
He was downright bored by his own admission.
Zilisch led the first 67 laps, and since this was a standalone road course race, he couldn’t even lose the lead on pit road, allowing him to just drive away over the course of two green flag stages. He won the first stage by 14 seconds and the shorter second stage by eight seconds and there wasn’t a lot happening behind the wheel.
“Yeah, it’s tough you know, when you’re leading by that much and just kind of out front by yourself,” Zilisch said. “It’s certainly a little bit … it gets boring, you know.
“It’s hard to believe, but you know, it does get boring when you’re just making laps and they keep telling you to slow down, slow down, slow down. And as a race car driver you don’t wanna slow down.”
Fortunately or unfortunately for the sake of his own personal entertainment, Zilisch was provided something to do over the final two restarts.
First, his own JR Motorsports teammate pushed Austin Hill to the lead on the penultimate restart, and was forced to take the chicane maze due to a William Sawalich lock-up, coming back out in second. Just as he closed the gap back, there was a caution and restart where he locked up the brakes and partially took the maze, coming out well ahead of a the chaos from second on back.
No penalty call from NASCAR.
“You know, a pretty crazy race,” Zilisch said. “I feel like we had a dominant car all day long and yeah, all of a sudden it, it turned into a bit of a mess with those late race restarts and just glad we were able to come out on top and get ourselves a win and what we deserved.
“I feel like it would’ve definitely been unfortunate to not win that one.”
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