The Big Read
Supercars driver Shane van Gisbergen tells Dale Budge how racing is in the blood ahead of his shot at title
saying you often hear when talking about Kiwi Supercars driver Shane van Gisbergen is that he was born to race cars. In most cases saying things like that is simply a clumsy way of praising someone’s ability to do something but in van Gisbergen’s case it might actually be close to the truth.
The 27- year- old lives and breathes motor racing. He has little going on in his life that doesn’t involve racing cars. Other Supercars drivers have interests in other sports — golf, cycling, triathlons etc while some have families — but the boy from South Auckland is a self- confessed petrol head.
Barring a disaster on the streets of Sydney this weekend — a place where he has dominated in recent years — van Gisbergen will win his maiden Supercars title and become just the third New Zealander and first since Jim Richards a quarter of a century ago to lift the sport’s biggest prize.
His journey to the top hasn’t been without complications but when van Gisbergen lifts the trophy tomorrow he will have completed a childhood ambition that most experts have seen coming for a decade or so.
Van Gisbergen grew up in Manukau on a farm surrounded on all sides by urban sprawl. He got an introduction into motorsport as a youngster with his father Robert still rallying cars competitively.
“My dad was a rally driver and I always went along to watch,” van Gisbergen said. “I got a quad bike when I was about seven and started racing when I was eight. We lived on a farm so I practised a lot on the bikes.
“My dad taught me to drive cars when I was 9 or 10. We have a gravel road that runs down through the farm and this is where I learned. It was awesome fun in not very nice cars. My first car was a Toyota Starlet.”
Sucked in by driving fast, van Gisbergen began to explore the idea of racing competitively — long before he was allowed to legally drive on a public road. He can recall the first time he raced in an official capacity.
“I was eight on a Suzuki 80cc quad bike,” he says. “The race was in Warkworth and I won it.”
From then on all he wanted to do was race.
“I never watched telly as a kid — I was always out there doing it. I just did it every weekend. I did a bit of go karting as well.
“I never planned to do anything with it — I was all right at it so I just kept going.”
The steely resolve we see now in racing mode wasn’t there so much off the track in his formative years.
“While he was fiercely competitive on the track any aspirations of turning his passion into a career path were not at the forefront of his thinking.
In fact he can’t even remember the time where he realised he could earn a living racing cars.
“Not sure. I was just enjoying racing and trying to progress and getting nice results. I don’t remember a particular point but sometimes things just happen.”
He does remember his first