So now that Trackhouse Racing has parlayed possibly the greatest leap of faith in NASCAR history into a playoff berth, who‘s next?
It‘s actually a two-part question.
Part 1 is finding another iteration of Shane van Gisbergen, who was tooling around race tracks literally half a world away when he got the FaceTime call from Trackhouse founder Justin Marks that changed his life and permanently has altered the landscape of NASCAR for the foreseeable future.
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With his third victory in five races, van Gisbergen is making a strong case he will be remembered as the all-time greatest road-course racer in the Cup Series.
Just consider the company he already is keeping.
With his victory at Sonoma Raceway, van Gisbergen joined four-time Cup champion Jeff Gordon as the only drivers to have won three consecutive Cup races from the pole position.
With his 34th start, van Gisbergen became the fastest driver to four wins since Baja 1000 and Indianapolis 500 winner Parnelli Jones in January 1967.
A three-time champion in Supercars (the premier category of racing in Australia and New Zealand), van Gisbergen wasn‘t plucked out of complete obscurity, but Marks deserves a ton of credit for giving the massively talented Kiwi a shot.
Yet that was only the first step.
Part 2 is having a team owner with the financial wherewithal and unshakable belief to commit a full-season Cup schedule to a driver largely untested in NASCAR.
Marks did that with van Gisbergen and might have created a blueprint for making the playoffs in the road course era of the Next Gen car.
The 2022 season brought the switch to a vehicle that is nimbler and more sophisticated than its lumbering and antiquated predecessor. And that opened the window to recruiting world-class road-racing talent with designs on parachuting into a NASCAR schedule in which one of every six races now features left and right turns.
Dropping a highly accomplished driver from the realm of single-seater formula or sports car racing into a stock car with the goal of securing a playoff berth no longer seems fanciful. It could be a Cup Series cheat code, provided a driver can get acclimated with as much aplomb as SVG.
Despite his immense lack of NASCAR experience, van Gisbergen has been very comfortable behind the wheel of the Next Gen with its independent rear suspension and sequential gear shifter, among the many reminders of his days dominating Supercars, which race entirely on road and street courses.
“He‘s something NASCAR has never seen on road courses,” crew chief Stephen Doran said. “It‘s just an honor being part of it. He‘s amazing. I don‘t know what else I can say about it. He shows it every time we come to these tracks.”
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Did Marks know van Gisbergen could be this good?
Perhaps not when he hired him for a one-off in the Project 91 program that was intended to showcase elite international drivers in Cup.
But then van Gisbergen stunned NASCAR on July 2, 2023 in the streets of downtown Chicago, and became the first driver in 60 years to win his Cup debut. Trackhouse wasted little time in assembling a fast-track program for van Gisbergen, who started last year in the Xfinity Series before moving to Cup this season.
By taking the calculated risk of putting SVG full-time in the No. 88 Chevrolet, Marks now has a car guaranteed to finish in the top 16 in the points standings (with a driver who has been ranked outside the top 30 for much of the season).
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It was a multimillion-dollar gamble that already has realized a major return on the investment.
“Unreal,” van Gisbergen said on Sunday‘s TNT post-race show when asked to describe his two-year whirlwind. “Chicago was just an experience that I really enjoyed, and I never thought it would lead to more, let alone moving over here and doing all these things. It‘s been amazing. Everything I could have hoped it would have ever been.”
And it all started with a leap of faith that any team owner could take with another undiscovered diamond of a driver possessing sublime road-racing skills.
So who‘s next?
The Cup playoffs could await.