With five wins so far in 2025, Trackhouse Racing must be feeling pretty optimistic about the team’s future in NASCAR’s Cup Series. After all, Ross Chastain won a crown jewel race in the Coca Cola 600, and Shane van Ginsbergen has won four races (Mexico, Chicago, Sonoma and Watkins Glen), tied for the most victories on the season with Denny Hamlin.
While Trackhouse is set to say goodbye to Daniel Suarez at the end of the season, they have already signed Xfinity sensation Connor Zilisch to drive for them full-time during the 2026 Cup campaign. While it hasn’t been officially announced as of press time, Zilisch will most likely pilot the #99 Chevrolet that Suarez is departing.
Van Ginsbergen has certainly captured his fair share of headlines in 2025, mostly because his wins have come in the Cup Series. Zilisch has made just three starts in Cup, all in 2025 and all for Trackhouse. His best result saw him finish just outside the Top 10 (in 11th) at Atlanta.
As of September 2, 2025, van Ginsbergen has the better career results in the Cup Series, of the two. However, if I were a betting man, I would suggest that it will be Zilisch and not van Ginsbergen who will have the more successful career in the Cup Series.
While van Ginsbergen’s four wins ties him for the most in the Cup Series, Zilisch has eight wins in the Xfinity Series. This ties him with another up-and-coming phenom, Corey Heim, for the most wins in any of NASCAR’s top series.
But such a record, especially just over the course of one season (and not even the full one yet at that) is not the reason I give Zilisch the nod. (Nor is it the fact that, while doing research for this piece, I found out his mother is originally from Thornhill, Ontario, making Zilisch half-Canadian.)
When it comes to road course racing, Van Ginsbergen is now the odds-on favourite for the win in the Cup Series. He’s taken the title of Best Road Course Racer in NASCAR away from Chase Elliott and Martin Truex, Jr., who in turn had taken it from Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart.
The problem is: he’s only winning there.
He has led at the superspeedways like Daytona and Talladega, but he hasn’t come close to winning. In fact, he’s had nine Top 10s in his Cup career and all nine have come at the road and street courses. His average finish for that particular genre of racing is 8.2. His next best track type is the two-mile intermediate tracks where his finish is 18th. (Of course, that result is a little deceiving, as he’s raced at a two-mile intermediate exactly once, at Michigan in June.) Van Ginsbergen has had eleven starts at mile-and-a-half intermediates and has an average finish of 25.6.
It has been often said that the longest distance in sports is that between the Xfinity and Cup garages. Therefore, to compare van Ginsbergen’s Cup wins to Zilisch’s Xfinity wins might be a tad presumptuous. However, it needs to be stated that while four of Zilisch’s eight wins have come on road courses (COTA, Sonoma, Watkins Glen and Portland), three others have come on ovals, including Dover, Indianapolis, and Pocono (which is oval-ish).
(I’m not sure how to categorize his win at Daytona. I mean, he started the race but then gave way to relief driver Parker Kligerman, which allowed for one of the best feel-good stories of 2025.)
But it bears examining the fact that Zilisch has experience winning on ovals in NASCAR while van Ginsbergen does not. While NASCAR has increased the number of road courses (presumably to try and draw fans over from F1 or to dispel the stereotype that all NASCAR drivers can do is turn left), the schedule is still dominated by mile-and-a-half oval tracks. In order to succeed in NASCAR, you have to be good on the mile-and-a-half ovals.
It’s similar to how the talents of drivers like Austin Hill (in Xfinity) or Ricky Stenhouse, Jr. and Michael McDowell (in Cup) are largely questioned because most, if not all, of their success have come on the superspeedway/drafting tracks.
(This could – and perhaps will – be the topic of an upcoming Track Talk. Why is NASCAR so ready to elevate any “road course specialist” to superstar status but downplays anyone whose biggest success comes on superspeedways? Personally, I think you should be the NASCAR equivalent of a “five tool player” to be considered among the elite.)
Don’t get me wrong. I think SVG is great guy and good overall for the sport of NASCAR. At a time when people demand diversity, he’s a New Zealander in a sport dominated (not unexpectedly) by Americans. And much like Kyle Larson has been lauded for competing in other genres of motorsports (sprint cars, the Indy 500), SVG should be given the same respect for coming over from the Australian Super Cars series. It definitely makes NASCAR look good when stars from other areas want to compete in the Trucks, Xfinity, and Cup Series.
However, if you want my take on which of the two recent signees to Trackhouse has the brighter future, right now it certainly appears to be Connor Zilisch.
johnmilner.ca 