“That battle with Carson [Kvapil] made me nauseous. Gonna be a fun but very stressful year,” Dale Earnhardt Jr. said in the aftermath of the battle between Connor Zilisch and Carson Kvapil in Saturday’s Focused Health 500. Multiple drivers from the same team racing for the win, the situation is nothing new for JRM. The 2022 Spring Charlotte Motorspeedway race saw Josh Berry and Justin Allgaier’s clash. Even before that, in 2017, William Byron won the championship while Elliott Sadler finished second and Allgaier third. The Focused Health 500 saw one more chapter added to the history of Organizational rivalry with 18-year-old Connor Zilisch in the middle.

In the race, Zilisch bagged the pole, and everything was going as planned. He even led all the laps in stage one and won it. But things went downhill at the end of stage 2. Many drivers were pitting under green, but when Zilisch entered the pit lane, a caution was raised on the track. And that meant that the pit road was automatically shut down and Connor Zilisch got a penalty for being there. This pushed him to start the race from P32. And that’s a long way to the top.

But Connor Zilisch wanted to win at any cost, which meant a lot of pushing, shoving, and spinning. But the problem was that he caught his own teammates on the way up to the checkered flag. First, he went in too deep with Justin Allgaier, giving him no room on the corner. Then he had a tough battle, taking the lead from Carson Kvapil, which eventually wrecked him. Well, JRM got the win, but Kvapil ended up 23rd, and Allgaier finished 29th.

Allgaier, despite the crash, kept his composure after the race. “We will have to sit down and talk about it to see what his mindset was in that moment. I don’t know if I wasn’t there that he was making the corner to be honest,” he said after the race. The entire saga is not making Junior happy and despite a positive start in 2025, Dale Earnhardt Jr isn’t celebrating. Zilisch failed to follow Junior’s one directive for the current season.

Like most teams do, even JRM holds a luncheon ahead of every season. This year there was one thing that Dale Jr. and co-owner Kelly Earnhardt emphasized on: let’s improve on teamwork.Naturally, Junior was disappointed. Discussing the incident in the recent episode of the Dale Jr Download podcast, he said, “He’s (Zilisch) young. He’s navigating the missteps and things. He’s a talented kid going to have a bright future and um you know learning how to be a better teammate. That’s just part of it. He’s going to have teammates all his life.” The worst part is that Zilisch did exactly what Dale Earnhardt Jr. told them not to do in the luncheon: to not be selfish.

Junior, talking on the same lines said, “I’ve always said this too if you got four, in this case five cars that are very good cars and five very capable race car drivers they’re going to hit. They’re going to hit. But we talk about it. I’ll close the Xfinity race. We started. We have a kickoff luncheon for our whole company at the beginning of every year. And my main message to everyone was let’s try to do a better job this year of being good teammates. And I’m going to be paying attention to that. I’ll be you know we’ve had some great driver lineups here in the past. But we always haven’t been the best of teammates and we’re very selfish a lot of times.”

Dale Jr.’s veteran remembers the 2023 Xfinity season, one full of JRM drivers wrecking other JRM drivers like Josh Berry wrecking Erik Jones at Daytona or Berry turning Justin Allgaier in Atlanta. There were many such incidents and Dale Jr wants his drivers to stop racing so hard with each other. For what it’s worth, Zilisch issued an apology immediately after the race.

“I’m honestly more frustrated with myself than I am happy. I made way too many mistakes. That made it way harder on myself. There are so many things I could say about myself that I could have done better. I don’t know how we came back and won the race. It’s just a testament to how fast our car was but I definitely have a lot to clean up moving forward,” he said. And this has won the heart of a veteran.

Denny Hamlin admires Connor Zilisch’s honesty

Now, for Zilisch, the weekend was a mixed bag. A DNG in his Cup Series debut and a controversial Xfinity win meant he left COTA feeling a lot of different things. However, for Denny Hamlin, it was Zilich’s honesty following the race that won #11 driver over.

Speaking on his podcast, Hamlin said, “Connor self admittedly was a little too anxious when he got back there in the pack and made some aggressive moves. What I liked about Connor was that he kind of acknowledged it after the race that, ‘Hey, I got some guys I need to get in contact with that I made contact with.’ He’s definitely very, very mature outside the race car. Inside the race car, his craft is amazing. It’s something that drivers like me will look at throughout the week to see how he’s approaching these tracks to make speed. It’s hard to ask much more from an 18-year-old to not get excited in those moments, and you’re going to have that.”

Hamlin’s words reflect Zilisch’s performance over the entire weekend, not just his Xfinity win. Debuting in the Cup Series at 18, a feat on par with drivers like Kyle Busch is not easy. And to add to that, coming in third and seventeenth in practice sessions just builds on to the Red Bull prodigy’s reputation. With the Shriners Children’s 500 at Phoenix just a few days away, it will be interesting to see what Zilisch will do based on his COTA learnings.

Folks, what do you think about Zilisch’s antics at COTA? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.