Auckland racer Shane van Gisbergen has turned a miserable week into one of the best of his NASCAR career, sweeping both national series races at California’s Sonoma Raceway and grabbing his second Cup Series win of the 2026 season. The Trackhouse Racing driver led 74 of the 110 laps in the headline Cup race on Sunday and held off a late charge from Chase Briscoe to win by 0.357 seconds, a result that lifts him back into the playoff picture with two months still to run in the regular season.
It was a commanding drive from a car the team did not rate highly going in. Van Gisbergen qualified sixth and admitted his Saturday running had been poor, but his crew rebuilt the No. 97 Chevrolet overnight and he did the rest with the braking and tyre management that have made him the most feared road racer in the championship. Ty Gibbs finished third, ahead of Kyle Larson and Christopher Bell.
The win carried extra weight because of how the previous week had gone. At the street race at Naval Base Coronado in San Diego, van Gisbergen was wiped out in a multi-car crash barely 32 laps in, an early exit that left him stewing. “I was pretty pissed for a couple of days, and then switched my attention to this race,” he said after climbing from the car. “We did pretty well all weekend and to get both races certainly makes up for it a little bit.”
He was just as quick to credit the crew for the turnaround. “We were really bad yesterday, and these guys did an amazing job turning this car into a winner,” he said.
The Sunday result completed a clean weekend sweep, as van Gisbergen had already won Saturday’s second-tier race at the same track. Doing the double at a road course is the kind of feat that few drivers manage, and for the 37-year-old it has become something close to routine. This was his second straight Cup win at Sonoma after taking the same race in 2025, and the eleven-turn, 1.99-mile layout in the wine country north of San Francisco now ranks among his happiest hunting grounds.
It was the eighth Cup Series victory of his career, and every single one has come on a road or street course. That record makes him the leading active winner on those tracks, moving him clear of former champion Chase Elliott. The Associated Press noted that the eight wins also draw him level with Hall of Famer Tony Stewart for the second-most road-course victories in NASCAR history, leaving him one behind the nine of the great Jeff Gordon. For a driver in only his third full season, and one who arrived in the United States with no oval experience at all, it is a remarkable haul.
New Zealand sport fans have watched the van Gisbergen story build for a few years now. He grew up in Auckland and made his name as a three-time champion in Australia’s Supercars touring car series, one of the toughest tin-top categories in the world. When he crossed to NASCAR for a one-off run at the inaugural Chicago Street Race in July 2023, he won on debut, becoming the first driver in sixty years to do so in the sport’s top tier. That result convinced him to move his life to North Carolina and chase a full-time American career, and the wins have kept coming.
The challenge now, as he openly acknowledges, is the rest of the calendar. NASCAR’s Cup Series is dominated by big oval tracks, the high-speed banked circuits where drivers run wheel to wheel for hundreds of laps, and that is the part of the craft van Gisbergen is still learning. He has improved steadily, but his championship hopes rest on turning solid oval finishes into the kind of results he produces almost at will when the track starts turning both left and right.
Sunday’s win moved him up to 14th in the standings and back into a provisional playoff spot, which in NASCAR is decided largely by race victories during the regular season. Two wins all but guarantees a place in the post-season once the cut-off arrives, so the Sonoma result does more than ease the pain of San Diego. It gives him a strong platform for the run home, and at least one more road course still to come where he will start as the clear favourite.
For now, van Gisbergen can enjoy a rare double. From the frustration of a wrecked car one weekend to a clean sweep the next, it was the sort of swing that explains why he remains, race for race, one of the most watchable drivers in the field, and one of the best things going for New Zealand motorsport on the world stage.
Details of the result were reported by FOX Sports, ABC News and NASCAR.
Did you watch the Sonoma sweep, and do you rate van Gisbergen as New Zealand’s best motorsport export? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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