Connor Zilisch looks ready for a gap year.
The 20-year-old has the sort of cherubic visage that could easily be mistaken for a politely ambitious and intellectually curious college student rather than the racing prodigy he is.
Locked in on a potential track to NASCAR superstardom, Zilisch won’t be taking a year to find himself by backpacking across Europe before starting the rest of his career in the corporate world.
But he will be embarking on a de-facto gap year in the Cup Series.
This week, Zilisch signed with Hendrick Motorsports and then spent Tuesday on a media and promotional blitz about joining the most successful team in NASCAR history.
The next day, he was back at Trackhouse Racing, where he will spend the rest of his rookie year in 2026 and the 2027 season before replacing the retiring Alex Bowman in Hendrick’s No. 48 Chevrolet for 2028.
Hendrick Motorsports@TeamHendrick
It’s official. @ConnorZilisch x 48 x 2028
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If that sounds like a complicated proposition best navigated by a team that has already overcome massive challenges over 42 years in NASCAR, the braintrust of Hendrick Motorsports would likely agree with you.
When pressed multiple times by reporters this week on how this arrangement would work, the details were mostly opaque and scant.
The primary takeaway was that signing Zilisch now was the only sensible option.
“Who knows where he would have landed had we not been able to put this together,” Hendrick vice chairman Jeff Gordon said. “He’s a guy that is sought after in the garage area, and we knew that we had to jump on that opportunity.
Said team owner Rick Hendrick: “When you have an opportunity for a guy like this, if you have to wait a year, that’s OK. It means so much to be able to have him in the organization in the future. If you have to wait a year, it’s OK. Those opportunities don’t come along. If we waited until next year, he wouldn’t be available.”
It’s a reasonable tradeoff, but there still are many unknowns and possible downsides to the gambit of a gap year, starting with the track record.
Signing a driver more than a year ahead is certainly unusual, but it isn’t unprecedented – and history shows it comes with some risk, because things usually don’t go according to plan.
In July 2005, Roush Racing seemed to have scored a coup by signing Jamie McMurray away from Chip Ganassi Racing starting with the 2007 season. A few weeks later, defending champion Kurt Busch agreed to leave Roush in 2007 for Team Penske.
An ordeal that dragged on for months – and generated mammoth legal bills to hammer out reworked deals between three teams, two drivers and myriad sponsors – ended with Busch and McMurray leaving a year early in 2006. Neither meshed well within the new organizations despite their highly anticipated arrivals, and both were gone by 2012.
The endgame has worked out better for Tyler Reddick, who signed with 23XI Racing in July 2022 despite having another full season left on a deal with Richard Childress Racing. It was an arduous process as team owner Richard Childress openly expressed his displeasure about the situation even after Reddick won twice more that season. Busch’s career-ending crash at Pocono Raceway that summer opened a slot for Reddick to slide into 23XI a season early, quelling the drama.
Childress had already endured a gap year in 2013 with Kevin Harvick, who signed at Stewart-Haas Racing before the end of the 2012 season. Ahead of winning the 2014 championship for SHR, Harvick won four times and finished third in the points during his last season at RCR.
It didn’t go nearly so well for Clint Bowyer, who spent 2016 at HScott Motorsports while waiting to replace Tony Stewart. After a miserable gap year of three top 10s and a 27th-place ranking in the points, Bowyer joined Stewart-Haas Racing in 2017 and won twice over his final four years before retiring.
The only other notable case of a driver spending a full season with one team while knowingly headed to another involves Hendrick, which signed Kasey Kahne midway through 2010 to replace Mark Martin in 2012.
Kahne spent 2011 at Red Bull Racing and won late in the season for a Toyota team that announced its impending closure months earlier. His eventual move to Hendrick never quite caught fire, producing six wins in six mostly star-crossed seasons.
Zilisch’s situation will be different.
Hendrick and Trackhouse are both Chevrolet teams, and Gordon says their weekly working relationships have never been closer.
In meeting with Trackhouse owner Justin Marks about Zilisch’s signing, Hendrick “offered to help in any way we could. We’re all one big team with Chevrolet. When we ride together, we all get better. We’ve got the door open to help in any way we can. I think we’ve got a great relationship with Justin. We respect the fact that Connor races for him the rest of this and next year. It’s our advantage to help Trackhouse do as well as they can.”
But yet …
What if Zilisch endures a confidence-sapping second season in Cup that’s even worse than an already miserable rookie campaign?
What if Hendrick prospect Corey Day wins an O’Reilly Auto Parts Series championship, raising questions about whether the team bet on the right driver?
Or what if Trackhouse emerges from a three-year slump with renewed ferocity, and Zilisch actually outperforms the Hendrick cars in his final season there?
No matter what happens in 2027, Zilisch, Marks and Hendrick executives are in for months of endless scrutiny about how their arrangement is working out.
When asked how communication and support would work with Zilisch in making for a seamless transition in 2028, Gordon deflected to Hendrick’s leadership.
“He knows how to keep the glue together,” Gordon said. “He knows how to read people. He knows how to bring them together and to pull together at the most critical time.”
A gap year generally is about change, growth and independence.
But in NASCAR, it’s just about ensuring the gap doesn’t become larger and longer than it naturally is.
Some NASCAR.com reads to check out from the past week:
Neil Paine explores if Joey Logano is truly a Chase championship contender after being on the bubble two months ago.
Zach Sturniolo explains how Hendrick Motorsports has gone back to the future with its signing of Connor Zilisch.
Pat DeCola on how solid results at Richmond Raceway set up a possible New Hampshire breakthrough for Hendrick.
Zack Albert looks back at the September 2005 win at California Speedway that launched Kyle Busch, the first of his 63 Cup Series victories.
Albert recalls Mark Martin’s final New Hampshire win, which helped cap a dream season in 2009 and also the focus of a new documentary series.
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