There was a time—not all that long ago—when the NASCAR garage knew exactly how to handle Shane van Gisbergen.
If the series was headed to a road course, everyone sighed because the New Zealander was about to make life miserable. If it was headed to an oval, well, there was still work to do.
Not anymore.
Somewhere between learning the art of tire management, figuring out stock car aerodynamics and discovering that rubbing fenders isn’t considered a personal insult in NASCAR, van Gisbergen has transformed himself from a road-course specialist into something much more dangerous.
An all-around contender.
Sunday night’s Window World 450 at North Wilkesboro Speedway may have been the latest, and perhaps clearest, evidence yet.
While Joey Logano dominated the headlines by leading a career-high 323 laps on his way to victory, it was van Gisbergen who quietly put together one of the most impressive performances of the night.
The Trackhouse Racing driver led 49 laps—more than he has ever led in a NASCAR Cup Series oval race, and the second most of the night—and finished fifth after spending much of the evening battling some of the sport’s biggest names at the front of the field.
It wasn’t a fluke, either.
Twenty-four hours earlier, van Gisbergen wheeled a NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series entry to a third-place finish on the same historic .625-mile oval. Put the two races together, and suddenly one of NASCAR’s most feared road racers looked awfully comfortable on a track that couldn’t be more different from Sonoma, Watkins Glen or the Chicago Street Course.
In fact, North Wilkesboro may have revealed something many of his competitors were hoping wouldn’t happen.
Shane van Gisbergen is learning.
And that’s bad news for everyone else.
The irony is that North Wilkesboro isn’t really an oval in the modern NASCAR sense. It’s a rhythm track. A balance track. A place where the fastest driver isn’t necessarily the one with the bravest right foot, but the one who can coax the most out of the race car lap after lap without abusing the tires.
Those are skills that sound suspiciously familiar to anyone who has watched van Gisbergen carve up a road course.
“It was an awesome night for the No. 97 Wendy’s Chevrolet team,” van Gisbergen said afterward. “It was pretty cool to get the lead. I just wasn’t good enough on the long run. But overall, I had a lot of fun. … It was a good points race, which is what we really needed.”
That last sentence may have been the most important.
For much of the season, van Gisbergen has relied on road-course victories to punch his playoff ticket while simply trying to survive the ovals. Now, he’s doing something much more valuable.
He’s collecting points.
He scored stage points Sunday, finished inside the top five and continued building momentum just as NASCAR’s postseason begins creeping over the horizon.
Perhaps the most revealing part of his evening wasn’t the finish or even the laps led. It was the explanation of how he got there.
“Yeah, it’s a bit like a road course,” van Gisbergen said when asked why North Wilkesboro suited him so well. “I tried right-foot braking for a bit. Half of the race, I right-foot braked and I just feel comfortable doing that. It’s a real balance track and you can really affect the car with your driving technique.”
That’s not something you hear from many NASCAR drivers.
Most spend their careers adapting themselves to the race car.
Van Gisbergen adapts the race car to his driving style.
It’s a subtle difference, but one that has followed him from Australian Supercars to NASCAR, and one that’s beginning to pay dividends on tracks where conventional wisdom suggested he’d struggle.
The scary part for the rest of the field?
He’s still learning.
North Wilkesboro isn’t a road course disguised as an oval. It’s one of NASCAR’s oldest, toughest short tracks—a place that punishes impatience and exposes weakness over 450 laps. Yet van Gisbergen spent nearly 50 of those laps out front and looked like he belonged there.
That’s a sentence few people would have predicted a year ago.
The NASCAR garage has already learned to fear Shane van Gisbergen when the schedule turns left and right.
If performances like North Wilkesboro become the norm, they may soon have to fear him when it only turns left.
And that’s a much bigger problem.
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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