Dale Earnhardt Jr. reacts to Connor Zilisch Xfinity championship loss, finds silver lining

Connor Zilisch’s 2025 Xfinity Series season was nothing short of remarkable. He accumulated ten wins in total, but there were dozens of dominant performances, and it all led to the emergence of one of NASCAR’s brightest young stars.

In the end, the JR Motorsports driver came up just short of the championship, as Jesse Love claimed the victory and the title at Phoenix. For team owner Dale Earnhardt Jr., the heartbreak was palpable, yet amid the pain, he found perspective.

“The feeling that I had after that race, it was heartbreaking. Connor was crying. Justin [Allgaier] seemed like he was emotionally upset as well, which I was a bit surprised about,” Earnhardt said on The Dale Jr. Download. “I walked up to Justin and I said, ‘Man, ain’t you glad we won the championship last year?’ My reaction in moments like that is to try to find some silver lining. Try to find some positives, right? Try to think about it — I can’t. I don’t want to cry. I don’t want to drown in my sorrows. I don’t want that. I want that to go away. The feeling that I had of being heartbroken, it hangs on, and it’s still bothering me today. And I want it to go away.

“So I’m thinking, ‘All right, what can make me feel better?’ Well, I’m going to the shop, at the shop on Monday, and I’ll start preparing for the next season. That’ll make me feel better. When the race ends, I told Justin, ‘We’re not sitting here crying over the fact that we’ve not won one ever. We’re just crying because we lost one that we had a shot at. But we’ve still got that trophy at home. You’re still a champion.’”

Earnhardt’s message to Zilisch, though, was one of perspective and endurance. It’s one drawn from his own journey through loss and resilience: “You go over to Connor and you go, ‘Listen, I had the worst day that you could imagine at a racetrack, losing my dad.’ And I hate to bring that up as an example. But I tell people, no matter what happens at the racetrack, what he experienced that Saturday night is not going to be the worst day he’s had at a racetrack.

“There will be others. I’ve experienced some bad days, and there will be other things that happen in his career. There will be successes and failures. This stings and this hurts and this feels like the worst day that you’ve had at a racetrack, but it won’t be. You’ll be able to, at some point, kind of come to terms with it. You won’t love it.”

“You will never not be bothered by it. There’s races that still pop up in my mind today where I’ll spend 15 minutes daydreaming about what I should have done to fix it or do a better job to have won. He’s going to do that. This might pop up in his mind 10 years down the road and he’ll freaking have a moment and get all upset about it and wonder what he could have done or should have done or whatever. But it ain’t as bad as it felt. It’s not the worst day.

“And he’ll, you know, we’ll go to race together next year. I think about it like that and I don’t know if that’s right or wrong and maybe that’s extreme. I just try to think, I say to myself, ‘This ain’t the worst thing that’s ever happened at the racetrack and it won’t be.’ And for him, he’s got this whole career in front of him of, you know, disappointment, successes. This is going to fall into a shuffled deck of cards full of good and bad moments if he has this long career.”

That’s a tremendous message from the NASCAR Hall of Famer to the young, promising wheelman. For Earnhardt, Zilisch’s loss wasn’t the end of a story, it simply was another chapter in the making. His message to the 19-year-old was clear — pain fades, lessons last but the best is still ahead. We’ll see if he can make good on that.