CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Connor Mosack can admit it now: He didn’t know what he was doing.
It was sometime in 2017. His first competitive race. Mosack was a few days away from his 18th birthday, and he was quietly observing and blending in with a field of drivers who’d been competing since they were 5 or 6 years old.
Mosack remembers coasting up on the grid a few minutes before the race. Everything was going according to plan, he thought.
That is, until someone came up to him and shattered that perception.
“Everybody pulls up on the grid to wait, and you kind of coast up there, and then you shut your motor off to keep everything cool — and I just had mine running,” Mosack recounted. “It was an air-cooled engine, so it’s just getting hotter and hotter and hotter.”
Mosack chuckled, as if he can still feel traces of the embarrassment of being a novice: “Someone finally came up to me, we were probably there for 10 minutes, and said, ‘Hey, you can turn that thing off.’ ”
Mosack shuttered on the inside but tried to keep calm on the outside.
“And I said, ‘Oh really?’ ”
Stories like these — of an old rookie finding his way in a sea of young veterans — make Mosack laugh now. And who could blame him? The 24-year-old driver and Charlotte native and High Point University graduate has earned that luxury considering all the success that has come his way since those early days driving a Legends car.
This weekend, Mosack will be running in the ARCA race on Friday and then in the Xfinity Series race on Saturday at Charlotte Motor Speedway, just a day before the NASCAR Cup Series runs the Coca Cola 600 on Sunday night.
In an interview with The Charlotte Observer, Mosack discussed what it was like getting into racing so late, a 16th birthday present that changed his life forever and more.
— The interview below was edited for clarity and brevity.
Meet Connor Mosack of NASCAR Xfinity Series
— Alex Zietlow: You didn’t get into racing until you were 18 or so, which I feel like is increasingly rare in motorsports. Nowadays, kids get put in some kind of car at like 6 or 7, maybe even earlier. Paint the picture for me: What was life for Connor Mosack before racing was introduced to him?
— Connor Mosack: I guess it was kind of like most people. Grew up going to school everyday and playing basketball or football after school. Grew up playing all different kinds of sports, kind of honing in on lacrosse in high school. Did that all four years of high school (at Covenant Day in Matthews). I ended up figuring out I wanted to race when I was 16. I always had a passion for it, you know: I’d always watch it and had been interested in it, but never really knew it was a possibility for me. I didn’t know anybody who was in racing. I didn’t know you could just go down the road to a track, rent a car from somebody and go race. We didn’t know anything.
What happened was for my 16th birthday, we did a racing experience at Charlotte Motor Speedway that I got gifted to me, and that was my first time ever really making laps in a real car, and that’s when I really fell in love with it. And there was a guy there who asked what I raced, and I was like, ‘Well, I’ve never raced anything.’ So he’s like, ‘Well you should really look at getting into it.’ And he recommended that the Legends cars are probably the best place to start, being as old as I was.
So he put us in touch with (Jordan and Walter Stillwell, who run Stillwell Racing), and we ended up doing that. They had an actual team they competed with, too, so we ended up renting a car from there. And we’ve just been kind of going ever since, I guess.
— Zietlow: When did you know that you had potential?
— Mosack: I guess the following year. So it was 2017 when I first ran a competitive race. It was like a week before my 18th birthday. And we didn’t really run all that good that year. We were just kind of learning. And the car wasn’t very good either, which we didn’t really know at the time. We were just out there figuring it out.
So we found out about this guy named Dennis Lambert (who has worked with Ben Rhodes and William Byron) later that year, and I reached out to him. He didn’t have anybody for the next year; I think he was trying to get out of racing. But thankfully for us, he was willing to run me for a year.
So right at the end of 2017, I ran one race for him. We would actually go test, and he was really the one who taught me to race. And his cars were really good too. So at the end of that year, we qualified second in a race, and that was the first time we had really been in the front of the field. And the whole next year, we were really competitive everywhere we went — ended up winning 25 or 30 races I think. So once we started winning and going to these big races and beating kids who we knew were really good, then that’s when we were like, ‘OK, maybe we can go somewhere with this.’
— Zietlow: So you’re just happy to be racing in 2017. And then you’re winning a ton in 2018. What was that like? Were you just like, ‘What the heck is going on?’
— Mosack: It was all such a blur now looking back at it. But you know, we really didn’t know what we didn’t know. It was crazy to think: In 2017, we went to the Summer Shootout, and we were happy if we ran 10th. And then the next year, we were mad if we didn’t win. So it was quite the turnaround, pretty cool. If I went back to 2017 and you had told me we were going to come back and win the championship the next year, I would’ve thought that was pretty crazy.
Definitely wasn’t expecting to start out like that, but it was just how it was supposed to be, and set us on the path that we’re on now.
— Zietlow: So you ran Late Model Stock cars in 2019 and then ran a full CARS Tour schedule in 2020. (Mosack has since spent the last two years in the Trans Am Series, with Late Model Stock events sprinkled in there every so often.) Were you a part of that magical night at North Wilkesboro Speedway last year with Dale Earnhardt Jr. and everything?
— Mosack: Yeah.
— Zietlow: Wait, seriously?
— Mosack: Yes. I don’t know where we finished. I think we got in a wreck with a few laps to go. So it wasn’t our night. But it was definitely a really cool night for sure.
— Zietlow: So what was it like, particularly as a kid who grew up enjoying the sport but wasn’t on the competitive side of it until later? I mean, that event effectively helped pave this historic past weekend in North Wilkesboro.
— Mosack: Yeah, well, you know, I didn’t have all the nostalgia of it because it was before I was born when they used to race there. But you still had an appreciation for the history of it, and it was just a really cool venue. The track was awesome. You almost felt like you were back at a local short track, like you’re at Hickory: Yeah, the facilities were kind of older, rundown. It wasn’t your typical NASCAR track that you go to where everything is first class. So it had that short-track, local feel. But then you had packed grandstands, thousands of people there. You had a big field. It felt like it was a really big race.
It was just a super cool atmosphere. Really the only time I’ve ever experienced that, really the only time I’ve run a race in front of that big of a crowd. It was definitely really cool. I wish I got to do it again this year, but I still got to go and watch, and it is just a special place.
— Zietlow: So you were there this past Wednesday?
— Mosack: Yes, sir.
— Zietlow: Very cool. OK, so this coming weekend at Charlotte Motor Speedway, you’re going to be at this place where, on your 16th birthday, you basically discovered that racing is fun.
— Mosack: Yes, the one I did when I was 16 on the mile-and-a-half track. So my first laps ever were on that track.
— Zietlow: If you had a crystal ball, what do you think the emotions will be like for you this coming weekend?
— Mosack: You know, it’ll be special for sure. We have a lot of friends and family coming both days, so it’s always special to be able to race with a lot of people that you’re close with there. And then obviously being at home, at the place where it all kind of started for me — both being my first laps in a racecar on a big track, and then also having a lot of success on the little quarter-mile infield road course there. So I feel like it’s a place that I’ll have a little extra confidence and a little extra comfort going to. ...
It’s definitely one of the tougher tracks we go to, so hopefully we’ll have a good shot at the win for the ARCA race, and then hopefully we get a solid top-10 finish on Saturday.
