Why Connor Zilisch is Shane van Gisbergen’s biggest road-course threat

The first two races of the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series season were pretty good to Shane van Gisbergen, all things considered. For one thing, SVG actually made it to the end of both -- not a given, considering the nature of the tracks (Daytona and EchoPark Speedway near Atlanta) and the chaos around him these past two Sundays. After a hard-luck 30th-place finish from 13th on the grid at Daytona, van Gisbergen rebounded at EchoPark by overcoming multiple spin-outs -- and an average running position barely inside the top 20 -- to work his way up into overtime contention and finish sixth, his best-ever non-road-course result in Cup. The same couldn’t be said for Connor Zilisch. The teenage phenom’s first full-time Cup campaign opened with a wreck at Daytona -- courtesy of one of the all-time broadcaster jinxes from Mike Joy -- and a 33rd-place finish. A week later at EchoPark, Zilisch was swept up in another multi-car crash that ended his race with 37 laps remaining. Two events in, he sits just 36th in points, 20 spots behind van Gisbergen. Yet, as the series shifts to Texas and the Circuit of The Americas for its first road-race of the season on Sunday (3:30 p.m. ET, FOX), the early standings feel almost beside the point. RELATED: Shane van Gisbergen driver page | COTA weekend schedule Van Gisbergen returns to his natural habitat riding a five-race Cup winning streak on road courses, one victory shy of tying Jeff Gordon’s record of six straight (1997-2000). Zilisch, meanwhile, closed last year’s O’Reilly Auto Parts Series schedule by winning four consecutive road races himself -- a streak that started after van Gisbergen’s late-restart pass on him at the Chicago Street Course. And despite their mismatched starts to 2026, Zilisch may be the only driver with a realistic shot to keep SVG from history in Austin. As we wrote about often last year, van Gisbergen more than solidified his place in history as NASCAR’s greatest-ever road racer with a season for the ages on the twisty tracks. In six road-course starts, he won five times -- starting in June at Mexico City, ranging all the way through the Charlotte Roval in October -- with an average start of 2.2, an average finish of 1.8 and an average Driver Rating of 140.2. (Remember, 150.0 is a perfect rating!) He led 301 of the 579 laps he ran on road courses throughout the season; nobody else led more than Kyle Busch and Ryan Blaney at 42 apiece. It was as overwhelming a tour de force as the Cup Series has ever seen on any single track type in a season. Ever since van Gisbergen burst onto the scene with a win at Chicago in his maiden Cup race in July 2023, the question has increasingly been, “can anybody here actually keep up with SVG on a track with left and right turns?” And among Cup drivers so far, the answer has mostly been a resounding “No.” Going back to 2023, 39 different drivers have logged at least five head-to-head Cup Series road races against the Kiwi, and none have gotten any closer on average finish or average Driver Rating than Christopher Bell -- who finished an average of 2.3 positions behind SVG, and a whopping minus-17.9 rating points back. Second-closest in the latter regard? A retired legend who isn’t even racing anymore: Martin Truex Jr.

“You know, he's so good, and it's rare that you see somebody stand out and distance himself from the competition as much as he is," Kyle Larson said of van Gisbergen last summer. "He's way, way, way better than us at the road course stuff. And he's got his own [heel-toe braking and shifting] technique, you can call it.” "You can't teach an old dog new tricks. Like, there's zero chance I can learn how to do that. And even if I did, like there's zero chance that I can have it be better than what I'm probably doing with left-foot braking. So yeah, he's just so good." If the recent Cup regulars are struggling to keep pace with SVG, then maybe it will take a new face to unseat the road-racing king from his crown. And that’s where Zilisch comes in. MORE: Connor Zilisch learns 'patience' is key to success in Cup Series The Charlotte native came to NASCAR as one of its youngest drivers ever only after competing in Europe as a karting phenom and becoming the first American to win the FIA Karting Academy Trophy in 2020 (among other honors). With his additional background running sports cars, it was no surprise Zilisch immediately crashed the party with a pole in his first Craftsman Truck Series race at COTA in 2024, then won the first O’Reilly Auto Parts Series race he ever entered, at Watkins Glen later that year. (Van Gisbergen was in the field for that race, leading 14 laps until Zilisch passed him on Lap 66 and led 23 of the final 24 laps en route to the win.) And then, 2025 was the year the SVG-Zilisch rivalry truly began to take shape. The pair dueled four times across Cup and O’Reilly -- as teammates for both Trackhouse and JR Motorsports, depending on the series -- with the two splitting the matchups and Zilisch claiming two head-to-head wins to SVG’s one. They tangled along the way, too, highlighted by the incredible final five laps at Sonoma in last year’s O’Reilly Series race, which saw the young phenom hold off the veteran road-course star down the stretch.

We expect nothing less than the same level of competition from the two teammates again this week at COTA. And in no small part, that’s because Zilisch has been literally the only guy at any level of NASCAR to hang with SVG on these kinds of tracks. Remember our earlier chart where Bell was the closest to van Gisbergen on Driver Rating in Cup road races, nearly 18 points per race behind? Well, across every head-to-head matchup of their careers at all levels, Zilisch has run just 0.2 rating points behind SVG -- basically dead-even -- and he’s finished an average of 0.6 positions per race ahead of his rival. Even granting that most of it didn’t come in Next Gen Cup cars, nobody else can claim anything near that level of competitiveness with the road-racing king.

Van Gisbergen has spent the past year rewriting NASCAR’s road-course record books and swatting away every challenger in sight. But Zilisch is the only driver who has shown he can actually meet that level, wheel-to-wheel, lap after lap. So if SVG is going to tie Gordon’s record and extend his reign, he’ll likely have to do it by beating the one rival who has already proven he can beat him -- and who may be standing in his way for years to come.