Conquering emotions key for van Gisbergen
With the new Supercars season beginning this weekend, New Zealand motorsport legend Greg Murphy looks at the Kiwi drivers. Today, Shane van Gisbergen.
The 30-year-old Shane van Gisbergen will be out to win his second Supercars title after a 2019 season which he found frustrating.
He finished second to Scott McLaughlin in the standings, but was never really in contention to beat out his Kiwi compatriot.
There’s no questioning van Gisbergen’s raw pace and attacking abilities and if every Supercars driver had identical cars, there’s a fair chance that van Gisbergen would finish first. However, life’s not like that.
‘‘Shane is just incredibly fast and competitive,’’ Murphy said.
‘‘He has an amazing set of natural skills for driving a racing car.
‘‘But the thing that lets him down a bit is his personality and how he handles circumstances that get him down.
‘‘He needs to change that, he needs to turn up and take a leaf out of some of these other leading drivers.’’
Murphy says he’s speaking from his own past experiences when talking about always having the right attitude and the four-time Bathurst 1000 winner admits that like van Gisbergen, he didn’t always get it right.
‘‘I know I sound like a hypocrite saying this, because I was one of the worst guys when it came to dealing with emotion and having the right attitude at the right time,’’ he said of his own career.
‘‘I let myself down in that respect. So I don’t want him to be doing that, because he’s got so much more to give, so much more to offer and his future is still so bright.
‘‘I’m saying what I’ve said from experience and he’s got something there with the way he deals with negative stuff, or not being able to deliver the best result he can, because the car’s not quite right, or he lets things get to him a lot more than his team-mate [Jamie Whincup] does.
‘‘It’s also more than what Scott McLaughlin does,’’ he added. ‘‘They’ve got different personalities, but that’s the thing that Shane suffers with and that’s what is letting him down sometimes, his ability to do a job as good as he can.
‘‘We’re all different and we all deal with things differently and that’s his little Achilles, because at the end of the day he wins a lot of races and delivers a strong performance.’’
While Holden won’t be involved in Supercars next season and Whincup is coming towards the end of his career, Red Bull Race Engineering will continue and van Gisbergen will be the face of the team for the foreseeable future.
Since moving from Tekno Autosports in 2016, van Gisbergen has finished first, third, second and second in the championship. That’s an impressive run of consistent driving, but with van Gisbergen it’s often a case of ‘if you ain’t first, you’re last’.
‘‘Since he’s been at Red Bull his worst finishing position is third and that’s phenomenal, but all he wants to do is win and I totally get that,’’ Murphy said.
‘‘That’s what it should be, but there are days when he might let himself down a bit, where he sort of gives up, when he needs to say ‘it’s not perfect, but I can still finish wherever’.
‘‘Sometimes he doesn’t think like that, he seems to end up in a bad huff and in a foul mood and it affects him.
‘‘Those days, he needs to minimise the damage the best he can and I don’t know if he’s doing that sometimes.’’