Van Gisbergen cool, calm and collecting titles
Shane van Gisbergen should win the Supercars title this weekend and cap a phenomenal season by the young New Zealander.
His Red Bull Racing teammate Jamie Whincup won’t give up but I just can’t see Shane missing out.
We will have those that will look at it and see a Triple Eight car winning again but that is testament to what they deliver. In this circumstance we are getting a fresh winner, someone who has never achieved this feat before — he will achieve more after this one I have no doubt — but he’s gone and added a new name to the trophy.
Shane has developed as a driver a lot in recent seasons. He has always had this incredible raw talent and it needed to be moulded and shaped and, in the last four or five years, he has really started to find his niche. He has been able to control his rawness and that has brought results.
He has worked it out for himself as well. He has found ways to succeed without necessarily driving the car the way he wanted — it might not always be the most enjoyable way, but it might be the best way to win a race.
Now he is regarded as one of the best — if not the best — drivers in the championship.
People will talk about the incident involving Whincup, Scott McLaughlin and Garth Tander at Bathurst and the penalty given to Whincup as a turning point. It was a big moment but there are significant moments in every championship — there were other ones in this one.
We have all got those stories, those ifs and buts. Bathurst was a significant moment but it happened and you move on. You just don’t know how these things are going to play out. You have to manage things as well as you possibly can at any given point.
I’m sure Shane could look back at things and say if they’d done things differently maybe this or that would have made a difference as well.
When you look to next year and beyond, it is hard to see anyone other than Shane or Jamie dominating but things change all the time.
Right now, the way the last 4- 5 months have transpired, it is difficult to believe anyone else could knock on the door of Red Bull and steal away what they have been able to achieve. It happened last year, though, when Mark Winterbottom had a hard- fought year and managed to come out on top and that could happen again.
The numbers and statistics make it hard to see anything different but it can be. Penske are amassing a real arsenal at the moment and it might be them.
The thing with Shane is, you know he will drive as well and as mistakefree as this year and that Red Bull team will push and push and whenever they have a tiny moment that doesn’t work, they find a way to fix it.