There’s losing to Shane van Gisbergen at a road course, and then there’s losing to Shane van Gisbergen by realizing afterward you probably should have won.
Chase Briscoe got the unpleasant version Sunday at Sonoma.
On paper, the finishing order will show another SVG masterclass. Another road-course win. Another weekend sweep. Another entry in the growing file labeled “Well, somebody else can try next time.”
But the last few laps told a different story.
As Sonoma turned into a 57-lap green-flag fuel-and-tire chess match, Briscoe and the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing team played it almost perfectly. Briscoe peeled off Lap 81 for four fresh Goodyears and fuel. SVG came one lap later.
And suddenly the impossible happened.
Van Gisbergen started coming back.
Briscoe’s team urged him to preserve the rear tires while SVG began showing something rarely seen on a road course: vulnerability. The gap shrank. Then shrank again. Four laps from the end, Briscoe had cut the lead to less than a second.
Then came the moment he’ll probably replay in his head somewhere around 2:17 a.m. for the next month.
Entering Turn 1, Briscoe missed the downshift.
Not dramatically. Not television-highlight dramatically. Just enough.
Enough to nearly lose the car. Enough to surrender precious ground. Enough to turn hunter back into pursuer.
And Briscoe knew it immediately.
“It was odd,” Briscoe said afterward. “Not very many people get that close to him at the end of one of these road course races.”
That’s the thing. Against SVG, getting close isn’t usually the problem.
Finishing the job is.
Briscoe didn’t hide from it.
“I felt like I definitely had the better car. I didn’t do as good of a job as he did driving.”
That’s not false modesty. That’s a driver doing the post-race math and coming up with an answer he doesn’t like.
Briscoe admitted the mistake in Turn 1 cost him the race.
“I was having to push so hard, and that was where I would make up my ground. It was just such a razor’s edge, and I about crashed.”
Yet even after giving away half a second, he still got back there.
On the final lap Briscoe launched one last attack into Turn 11, closed onto SVG’s rear bumper and briefly made Sonoma look less like a coronation and more like a fistfight.
But van Gisbergen survived.
Which may actually be the most revealing part.
Because for once, the road-course king wasn’t untouchable.
He just had enough left.
Briscoe left Sonoma with a runner-up finish that ties his best result of 2026 and, unofficially, sits 11th in points.
He also left with something far less comforting: proof that he could beat SVG.
And proof that he didn’t.
Greg was a writer for DriveTribe supporting Amazon's The Grand Tour and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, and a Masters degree in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek and a regular contributor to Forbes.
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