LAS VEGAS — Shane van Gisbergen’s quick rise in the NASCAR Cup Series has been nothing short of cinematic.
He won his very first Cup start on the Chicago Street Course in 2023 out of nowhere and took NASCAR’s top level by storm with five wins in his first full-time season last year.
Maybe not a “Best Picture” nominee at the Academy Awards, but van Gisbergen has a tantalizing “It Follows” plot where he serves as the entity endlessly chasing the main cast of drivers until one day, he finally catches them. That day may come sooner rather than later, and drivers are on notice of how quickly the New Zealander is settling in on the circuit.
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“Certainly the trend is continuing that he keeps getting better,” Hamlin said Saturday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. “I think that’s what [Trackhouse Racing owner] Justin [Marks], the whole Trackhouse group was hoping for. While they know what he can do on the road courses, as he proved it in his first start, can he adapt to these [ovals], and elite, superior drivers find a way to adapt. And he’s one of those.”
There was little surprise that van Gisbergen struggled in his first few races on ovals.
In select Cup Series starts in 2024, the 36-year-old wheelman competed on tracks like Charlotte Motor Speedway, Darlington Raceway and Las Vegas, but mustered a best finish of 26th at Darlington in that stretch.
In his rookie 2025 season, he started slow with 31st, 34th and 32nd-place results at Phoenix, Las Vegas and Homestead, respectively, but broke through in the crown jewel Coca-Cola 600 with a solid 14th-place run.
The road-course dominance was predictable, and van Gisbergen kicked the field, winning five of the six races on such tracks. Then, the playoff stretch of tracks appeared, and it seemed as though van Gisbergen was starting to find his footing on NASCAR’s bread and butter.
He was 14th at Richmond Raceway and then nabbed his first intermediate top 10 at Kansas last September.
Through the first four races of 2026, which included two superspeedways, a road course and the unique 1-mile layout of Phoenix, van Gisbergen is fifth in points with two top 10s pocketed already.
Three-time Cup champion Logano said that van Gisbergen’s strong start is credited more toward the wild card events to begin 2026 rather than pure talent, but still had praise for the driver early in his stock-car career.
“He’s obviously had a pretty solid start,” Logano said. “The speedway races and obviously the road course, you expect him to be good. We’ve had one normal type race at Phoenix, and even with that, still, what was there, 12 cautions or something? It was a lot. I think it’s just we haven’t seen much normalcy yet. I think obviously it’s great he’s up there. I mean, he’s doing a good job. I’m not taking it away from that. I’m just saying we haven’t gotten into a flow yet. Still hard to look at points.”
Van Gisbergen was the cause of two of those cautions in Phoenix, spinning twice off Turn 4.
But the No. 97 Trackhouse Chevrolet driver recovered from the adversity to place 11th and made 118 green flag passes, according to NASCAR’s Loop Data, which was seventh-best among the Cup field last weekend.
“I feel like we’ve been able to execute and get the most out of our situations, which is awesome,” van Gisbergen said of his results-saving efforts. “Like [EchoPark Speedway] was a yo-yo. The leaderboard for us, up and down. Pretty cool to do the same at Phoenix last week, but it would be nice to have a trouble-free day. It wasn’t really our doing last week with the tire and stuff. Hopefully, we can have more smooth sailing.”
The rapid growth for van Gisbergen could’ve stemmed from him experimenting at ovals last year with a playoff ticket intact for most of the regular season. However, that won’t be the case this year as NASCAR reverted back to The Chase postseason format, which is solely a battle for points week-to-week. So the balance of finding his groove versus having clean days has leaned more into doing what he can to score the most points in any given race.
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“Last year, I could afford to do that,” van Gisbergen said. “You’re locked in the playoffs, whereas now you need to get as many points as you can every week. So certainly the risk-reward ratio for me has changed a lot, so probably going to drive a little more conservative, but you still got to push it too. It’s a real fine line this year.”
2020 Cup Series champ Chase Elliott said he isn’t surprised to see what van Gisbergen has already accomplished at the Cup level, and that his trajectory comes from his swift adaptability in NASCAR rather than the few similarities between the current Generation 7 Cup car and van Gisbergen’s roots in Australia’s Supercars championship.
“I know that there’s been a lot of [comparisons] to his background and the similarities of this car change that we had to that, but I’m sure it’s still different,” Elliott said. “I’m sure there’s still things that he had to rely on, his natural feel inside the car, to help tune and make it better and make it what he wanted on the road-course side. When I look at how his oval stuff has improved, I’m not surprised. I think he’s really knowledgeable. I think he’s got a great feel for just natural balance behind the wheel, which I think is a really big deal.”
Christopher Bell, who won the pole for Sunday’s Pennzoil 400 presented by Jiffy Lube (4 p.m. ET, FS1, HBO Max, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio), was more blunt on van Gisbergen and explained why the cream of the crop will continue to maintain the upper hand on the rising star.
“Fortunately for his competitors and unfortunately for him, the [weekend] format handicaps him tremendously,” Bell said. “If he would have done this years ago, where we had hours of practice and multiple sets of tires for practice, I think he would have been a lot further along. But the format that we race under today, with one set of tires for a 20-minute practice session, I think has taken him a little bit longer to develop the oval stuff. But he’s clearly getting the hang of it, and it’s not going to be long before he’s a factor on an oval.”
So is an oval win on the cards for van Gisbergen soon? For now, he doesn’t believe so.
“Man, I’m a long way from that,” van Gisbergen admitted. “I need luck to get that and I don’t want to win like that. I’m learning things and feel big improvements every week still, and know what’s going on now rather than just deer in headlights, but I know I’m still probably a little bit away from a win.”