Shane Van Gisbergen is making the rest of the NASCAR grid look like chumps. This weekend at Watkins Glen International the 36-year-old Kiwi absolutely obliterated the field to take his ninth road course victory since making the transition from Australian Supercars champion to Trackhouse Racing’s full-time road course ringer. With four wins on the season, twice as many as current series points leader William Byron, SVG is locked in to the playoffs and theoretically eligible for the 2025 NASCAR Cup championship in his rookie season, something only six other drivers have ever done. OK, so he isn’t quite up to speed yet when it comes to oval racing, but he’s holding his own and learning with each passing race.Â
While many vocal NASCAR fans on social media are decrying road courses as anathema to the sport, the people running the game are learning the same lessons that IndyCar learned twenty years ago, ovals just don’t have the same draw that they used to. Younger fans like road course racing, and as Formula 1’s influence continues to grow in the U.S. market, NASCAR wants to catch some of that rising tide for itself. With six road and street courses on the calendar for 2025, Trackhouse knew that if it wanted to take some wins and keep sponsors happy, they needed a driver in the lineup who could deliver while turning left and right.Â
SVG’s performance this weekend made something crystal clear, he’s miles ahead of any other driver in NASCAR right now when it comes to road courses.Â
Get good
Every other team in NASCAR has known the 2025 series schedule would include six road courses since early 2024, but apparently didn’t do much of anything different to prepare. Yes, six races out of a massive 36-race season is hardly enough to win you a championship, but at 17% of the season, it’s a pretty important chunk. A smaller team, like Trackhouse, could have focused its resources on getting setups perfect, or training its drivers on any of these events to try to get a crucial win for that all-important playoffs eligibility, but apparently none of them took it seriously enough to even be within the same zip code as SVG and Trackhouse. With four road course wins on the trot, and only losing a fifth at Circuit of the Americas by dint of getting punted, Van Gisbergen is really putting his mark on the sport this year.
Don’t get me wrong, a lot of this success is borne out by Shane’s immense talent and 17 seasons in remarkably similar touring car machinery down under. But don’t forget that NASCAR’s golden boy slur-shouter Kyle Larson once said he could beat four-time Formula 1 champion Max Verstappen in equal equipment. Shane isn’t Max Verstappen by any stretch of the imagination, and Larson can’t even manage to beat him with a decade of home court advantage. Kyle’s average finish on a road course across the 2025 season so far is 31st, buoyed by a 13th place finish at the Mexico City round. By comparison Shane’s average finish is 2nd, dragged down by a 6th at COTA. Maybe instead of worrying about a movie that came out 19 years ago, he should be worried about his own performance. Embarrassing, dude. I’d never show my face in public again if I were him.Â
By a mile
Last weekend’s race is the perfect display of SVG’s talents. He didn’t have the fastest car, falling just short of Team Penske’s Ryan Blaney, to start the race from second place. The whole race was a complete strategy play for SVG, as he knew he could save his tires for the final stage of the race. Once the final round of pit stops filtered through, Van Gisbergen was at the front with just enough fuel to make it to the finish and the talent to keep his speed up without burning off his tires. For the final 30 laps or so, he was just toying with the field, slowly and methodically building the 11-second gap that he finished the race with. He wasn’t setting fastest laps, far from it, he was running around 1.5 seconds off his car’s outright pace, but he was still half a second a lap clear of the field. A conservative SVG is still half a second per lap at Watkins Glen faster than the hardest chargers the sport can throw at him.Â
NASCAR has kind of always been a joke in the field of international motorsport. Practically nobody outside of the U.S. takes it seriously. That’s definitely a mistake, because there are some seriously talented drivers in this field. It is downright embarrassing that the biggest teams and their multi-millionaire drivers are either unable to, or perhaps even unwilling to, take road course racing seriously enough to mount a challenge against a newcomer rookie. SVG is talented, no doubt about it, and his 2025 race record should feel like a black eye to every single driver he beat.Â