{"id":586945,"date":"2026-04-07T00:33:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-07T00:33:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/586945\/"},"modified":"2026-04-07T00:33:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-07T00:33:07","slug":"watch-eden-prairie-native-william-sawalich-analyzes-first-nascar-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/586945\/","title":{"rendered":"Watch: Eden Prairie native William Sawalich analyzes first NASCAR win"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Eden Prairie native William Sawalich drives the No. 18 Toyota full-time for Joe Gibbs Racing in the NASCAR O\u2019Reilly Auto Parts Series and he won his first career O\u2019Reilly Auto Parts Series race at Rockingham Speedway on Saturday.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>KSTP Sports caught up with Sawalich, via Zoom, on Monday to hear all about the milestone win. It\u2019s the first by any Minnesota native in NASCAR.<\/p>\n<p>***Click the video box above to watch our conversation with Sawalich***<\/p>\n<p>Grabbing the lead and control of the race after a restart on Lap 172, Sawalich,19, pulled away over the final 79 laps.<\/p>\n<p>The win moved Sawalich to 11th in the series standings, with the top-12 qualifying for the playoffs. While still relatively early in the season, Sawalich noted with us the importance of maintaining good positioning.<\/p>\n<p>Saturday was Sawalich\u2019s 42nd career start. He was a multi-time race winner in the ARCA Menards Series prior to moving to the NASCAR O\u2019Reilly Auto Parts Series full-time in 2025. He missed out on the playoffs last year.<\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tFor Related Stories:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/kstp.com\/tag\/nascar-oreilly-auto-parts-series\/\" rel=\"tag nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">NASCAR O&#8217;Reilly Auto Parts Series<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/kstp.com\/tag\/sports-features\/\" rel=\"tag nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Sports Features<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/kstp.com\/tag\/william-sawalich\/\" rel=\"tag nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">William Sawalich<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Eden Prairie native William Sawalich drives the No. 18 Toyota full-time for Joe Gibbs Racing in the NASCAR&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":586946,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[446],"tags":[49,48,634,109587,82,188340,107302],"class_list":{"0":"post-586945","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nascar","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-nascar","11":"tag-nascar-oreilly-auto-parts-series","12":"tag-sports","13":"tag-sports-features","14":"tag-william-sawalich"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=586945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586945\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/586946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=586945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=586945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=586945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}