MADISON, Ill. — Despite both drivers matching their best career Xfinity Series results, William Sawalich and Christian Eckes stood next to their respective cars forlorn and frustrated after a grueling 160-lap feature in Illinois.
Their forlorn demeanors spoke for themselves. Both drivers came up just short of a NASCAR Xfinity Series playoff berth.
Sawalich finished one short in second.
“Definitely did everything I could to race cleanly.” Sawalich said post-race. “That’s kind of always my goal. I mean, we gave our best effort as a team.”
Eckes was right behind him in third.
“Disappointed for sure,” Eckes said post-race. “We knew we had to come here and win, and we didn’t achieve that, so it is what it is. We’ll move on.”
The same couldn’t be said for Harrison Burton. Despite a difficult night, his playoff berth was secure.
“It’s all about execution now and we got our mulligan tonight,” Burton said. “We got lucky tonight, and we can go and try and haul the mail in the playoffs. … So, we’ll just take it one race at a time and go try and enjoy this playoff run.”
Before Saturday, Burton knew he was in danger of losing his playoff spot for one of the hungry drivers who were below the cut line.
Yet ironically, it wasn’t Eckes nor Sawalich he was mostly concerned of, it was his own cousin Jeb Burton.
The driver of the No. 27 Jordan Anderson Racing machine was the only driver in the field still within points reach of his relative when the green flag first waved.
For most of the night, the two cousins raced around each other in the middle of the pack. However, on lap 111, Jeb Burton’s tire blew, sending the son of Daytona 500 champion Ward Burton hard into the outside wall.
“We blew a right front tire, so, hard hit,” Jeb Burton said outside of the care center. “It’s very disappointing, but you know, to do everything we’ve done this year, we still got a lot to be proud of.
“We’re the only car up there that doesn’t have a technical alliance with a [NASCAR Cup Series] team, and we’re 13th in points, right? We’re the first car without the stuff, and everybody ahead of us has it, and everybody behind us in the first couple spots has it too, so you got a lot to be proud of.”
His day was over, and Harrison Burton breathed a small sigh of relief.
Or at least he did until his spin.
While the No. 25 Ford wasn’t having a good race for most of the night, with Jeb Burton out of the race, the only thing he had to worry about was a new race winner spoiling the field.
Thanks to the dominant Connor Zilisch, it didn’t appear anybody was going to be able to fulfill that possibility.
But with 12 laps to go, it got very close.
Sawalich made a lunge for the lead on the final restart and cleared his Xfinity rivals for the second position. Eckes, who restarted sixth, launched himself all the way to third.
It was perhaps the strongest both drivers had run all year.
Yet it wasn’t enough. Both drivers finished second and third, just short of a first career victory and subsequent playoff entry.
“Just to tell myself to keep going, you know, but we’re still not done,” 18-year-old Sawalich said. “I mean, we have room to improve, obviously, one more spot, so we’re not going to stop until we do that.”
Like Sawalich, Eckes suffered at the beginning of the year. With five DNF results in the first 14 races, the Kaulig Racing prospect had a steep mountain to climb to regain his championship hopes.
Too steep.
“I felt like we had a race-winning car,” Eckes said. “With a restart, who knows what could happen, but disappointing not to get this team in the playoffs. They deserve to be in the playoffs, but just about seven too many DNFs and a lot of problems.”
The silver lining, however, is the silver and white car that finished 22nd.
Harrison Burton now enters the Xfinity postseason for the first time since 2021, his last full-time year in the series.
All the better, he does it with underdog team AM Racing, which now has earned its first playoff appearance in its history.
“I knew that the team had struggled in the past,” the former Cup driver said. “I’m coming off of getting fired. I knew that we were both hungry. I knew that we were both eager to try and get ourselves to a situation like this. I felt like there were some races that we’ve thrown away. There’s some races that we’ve kind of scavenged and ran better than maybe we should have.
“I’m happy, really proud of this team to go from, I don’t know where they were, 31st or something in points to the playoffs, is a big accomplishment, and kudos to the guys at the race shop.”
For each driver, however, the outlook is undoubtedly the same. Each of them will be heading into Bristol Motor Speedway next weekend looking for their first win of 2025.
Dalton Hopkins began writing for Frontstretch in April 2021. Currently, he is the lead writer for the weekly Thinkin' Out Loud column, co-host of the Frontstretch Happy Hour podcast, and one of our lead reporters. Beforehand, he wrote for IMSA shortly after graduating from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in 2019. Simultaneously, he also serves as a Captain in the US Army.
Follow Dalton on Twitter @PitLaneCPT