BRISTOL, Tenn. — Connor Zilisch collected Saturday’s winning trophy in the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series race at Bristol Motor Speedway, but his JR Motorsports teammate Justin Allgaier secured his eighth total six-figure check as the Dash 4 Cash winner at the “Last Great Colosseum.”
Allgaier, the 2024 series champion, hung around inside the top five all night while chasing Zilisch and Kyle Larson, but the No. 7 JR Motorsports Chevrolet was just a step behind being a race-winning contender.
With a not-too-shabby fourth-place run, the longtime O’Reilly Series veteran continued his gratitude for the Dash 4 Cash program.
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“We made adjustments on the car that I thought would help it,” Allgaier said after the race. “For whatever reason, we never could quite get where we wanted to get to when you flip-flopped both sides of it. I thought the team did a really good job. We just came up short. I am super pumped, though. O’Reilly Auto Parts had the opportunity to not bring the Dash 4 Cash back, right? So to have that back and to keep that trend going is really, really cool, really special, and something that means a lot to me.”
A caution with 30 to go flipped a dominant Larson day on its head, and asserting his name into the mix with Zilisch, Allgaier and Larson was rookie Brent Crews.
Making just his fifth O’Reilly Series start, the 18-year-old phenom for Joe Gibbs Racing drove from a 17th-place starting spot to a third-place result — his first career top five.
Another eye-popping performance pocketed by Crews, but he lamented after the race that it ‘sucks’ to lose to his good friend Zilisch.
“Connor is one of my best friends when we step foot out of a race suit,” Crews said. “And when we get in the car, we are the world’s biggest rivals. Not necessarily that we’d wreck each other or anything, but there’s no one on this earth I would want to lose to rather than Connor. Made some rookie mistakes there, getting free up into the wall. If I just kind of backed it up some, I could have helped myself out. But it was tough with Larson breathing down my neck, packing air on me. So it’s tough, but grateful to be here.”
The two-time Cup Series champion Larson battled both rising stars in the heated closing laps. He tallied a race-high 230 laps led, but a call to pit under a late caution ultimately cost the No. 88 Chevrolet driver the chance to cap an otherwise dominant performance. Regardless, Larson said he enjoyed racing both Crews and Zilisch to the finish.
“We’ve all known that they’re really good long before tonight,” Larson said. “They did a great job. It was a lot of fun racing with them and Brent did a super good job to get to the lead. It was easy to just kind of step and get over it. He unfortunately did, and then Connor did a good job of getting in front of me up top at the right time. I was hoping he’d run the bottom one more corner and leave me an opportunity to get to his outside. But yeah, he did a great job. So that was fun.”
Allgaier has also taken notice of Crews, observing the youngster’s talent for a handful of years on the local scene at tracks like Millbridge Speedway.
“He has everything he needs, tool-wise, to be able to go and do this at a high level, and be a Cup champion at some point,” Allgaier said. “He got a little more aggressive than I would have liked to have there with about 30 to go or so, but that’s just how it works. You’ve got to go out there and you’ve got to go for it. Then at the end, I thought if he kept getting the wall, we were gonna have a shot to get by him. I have no doubt that he’s gonna be a threat next week when we go to Kansas.”
Both Allgaier and Crews will compete for the second of four Dash 4 Cash races next Saturday at Kansas Speedway, along with Carson Kvapil and Sheldon Creed (7 p.m. ET, The CW, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
MORE: Dash 4 Cash info | History of Dash 4 Cash winners
Allgaier is looking to accomplish a milestone of $1 million earned in the program this season.
“That’d be fantastic. I would love that,” Allgaier said. “To think about that, and to think about how many men and women that work at our shop that that has affected. How many tools and resources that that has provided for us to do what we did tonight, right? To finish 1-2-4-5, those are big deals and I feel like our company as a whole does a really good job of using the budgets that we have to the best of our ability.”