THE GIZ DOES IT AGAIN
Shane van Gisbergen’s rivals and fans have often had cause to wonder if there is any motorsport category he can’t win.
Now he has added to his racing mana by winning his first ever start in Nascar.
It is 60 years since Johnny Rutherford won on debut at Daytona in 1963.
On the day when NASCAR’s
Cup Series raced on a street course for the first time, the record was reset after three-time Australian Supercars champion van Gisbergen claimed the win on the streets of Chicago.
“You always dream about it. What an experience. This was so cool. This is what you dream of. Hopefully I can come to do more. The racing was really good, everyone was respectful. It was tough, but really fun.”
Van Gisbergen had been among the lead pack for most of the first part of the race, but on lap 42 a large group of cars running toward the back decided to gamble on the race ending early and made pit stops.
On the very next caution a few laps later organisers announced that the race would be cut 25 laps short. All of the leaders found themselves buried in the pack after they made their own stops.
That strategy call vaulted Justin Haley – who’d started last after a crash in practice sidelined him from qualifying – into first place with Chase Elliott leading the pursuit.
Van Gisbergen, meanwhile, was stuck in 17th, but made good progress through the traffic. With 10 laps to go he was fifth. On lap 67 he got around Elliott for third, but his pursuit of Haley was stunted by the eighth of the race’s nine cautions, triggered by Martin Truex Jr finding the tires.
A single-file restart meant the Kiwi couldn’t attack Haley immediately at the restart, so he waited until Turn Two instead. He took the lead and held it to the finish.
Not only did he make history as the first Kiwi to win a Nascar race, he was also the winner of the best-rating Nascar event since 2017.
Nascar racers praised the Kiwi’s gritty drive.
Kyle Busch, who finished fifth, has previously partnered with the New Zealander in AIM Vasser Sullivan’s Lexus line-up at the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona. He said he was fully aware of the threat van Gisbergen represented on a street course.
“That’s what he’s grown up doing,” Busch said. “That’s what he’s done his whole life. Fortunate for him, he’s done it in bigger, heavier stock cars, not lighter weight GT cars or some IMSA cars or something like that.”
Kyle Larson was among the frontrunners when van Gisbergen was making his late charge through the field after being dumped into the pack during the pitstop sequence, and while the battle between the pair was over more quickly than the Hendrick driver would have liked, he said being able to run behind van Gisbergen after being passed was educational.
“It was so fun to watch from my view,” Larson said. “When he got to my back bumper, I felt like I pieced together a really good section and I was like, I thought for sure I’d look in the mirror and I was going to be like two car lengths or something in front of him, and he was glued to my back bumper and I was like, holy ****, this guy is flying.”
Elated, van Gisbergen had a quick answer for that, paying respect to the series regulars.
“I’m sure if it was an oval it would be the other way around. This is my bread and butter, the street circuits. Almost half of our (Supercars) races are street circuits. I’m comfortable with the walls. It took me a bit to learn the proximity of the car, having the car on the other side of me, so I was missing apexes turning left and struggling turning right to know where that side of the car was.”
NBC Sports’ coverage of the first-ever Nascar street race in Chicago averaged a Total Audience Delivery (TAD) of
4.795 million viewers on NBC and Peacock according to data provided by Nielsen.
The event was the mostwatched NASCAR Cup Series race on NBC since the Indianapolis race in 2017, which averaged
5.647 million, and was NBC
Sports’ eighth most-watched overall under its current rights agreement.
A final note: series front runner Chase Elliott – who smacked the wall in qualifying while chasing van Gisbergen – was on social media afterward, paying respect to the Kiwi’s achievement and fretting that SvG would “go home and tell everyone how bad we are.”