{"id":116579,"date":"2025-09-03T11:21:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-03T11:21:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/116579\/"},"modified":"2025-09-03T11:21:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-03T11:21:08","slug":"why-nascars-road-course-ace-may-not-get-to-use-his-best-playoff-card","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/116579\/","title":{"rendered":"Why NASCAR\u2019s Road-Course Ace May Not Get to Use His Best Playoff Card"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Shane Van Gisbergen, driver of the #88 WeatherTech Chevrolet, enters his car during qualifying for the NASCAR Cup Series Cook Out 400 at Richmond Raceway on August 15, 2025. (Samuel Corum\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

There\u2019s never been an unstoppable force in NASCAR quite like Shane Van Gisbergen at a road course<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The 36-year-old Kiwi and former Supercars champion<\/a> had never driven in an American stock car at all before the first-ever Chicago Street Race in July 2023. But he promptly won there<\/a> in his debut, then won a trio of road races<\/a> in the second-tier Xfinity Series last season \u2014 and he now has four wins<\/a> (all on road courses) in his rookie Cup Series campaign. All told, he\u2019s now run 20 total road\/street races in NASCAR national series, and he\u2019s won nine of them \u2014 including a 5-for-11 showing in Cup (45 percent) that represents the highest career winning percentage any driver has at any track type in the sport\u2019s modern era:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

So naturally, when SVG qualified for the 2025 Cup Series playoffs with a healthy-seeming 16-point cushion over the cutline<\/a> for the second round, all eyes were on the third racetrack of that particular phase: the Charlotte Roval<\/a>, a speedway\/road-course hybrid with enough left- and right-hand turns to make Van Gisbergen a serious threat to win again \u2014 and automatically punch his ticket to the penultimate round of the title chase<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At the Roval in Xfinity last year<\/a>, SVG started on pole (a constant theme of his at twisty tracks) and finished third only because he lacked the tires to hang on over the last dozen laps<\/a>. In Cup<\/a>, he once again started on pole and led the first 21 laps of the race before finishing seventh. Given that his road-racing dominance has only grown since then, the fear of SVG making a deep playoff run was well-founded. All he had to do was nurse his edge in points, avoid bad days and make the Round of 12\u2026 then cash in on his chance to win the last road course on the Cup calendar.<\/p>\n

But after just one race of the playoffs<\/a>, it\u2019s currently looking like Van Gisbergen may never put his not-so-secret weapon as a road-racer to use when it counts toward the championship. Unless he makes a couple of strong drives under pressure, SVG\u2019s only Roval role might be as a spoiler to drivers still in active consideration for the title.<\/p>\n

Going into the playoffs, my NASCAR playoff forecast model<\/a> showed that SVG had more upside with a good finish at Darlington \u2014 a tough, technical oval \u2014 but it also highlighted how he could lose a lot of advancement probability<\/a> with a poor performance in the postseason opener. And unfortunately, Van Gisbergen went down the latter path with a 32nd-place run<\/a> that knocked his odds to advance from 65 percent to just 39 percent.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Now, SVG will be the driver under the most pressure this weekend at Gateway Motorsports Park in St. Louis, according to my measure of playoff leverage<\/a>. (Essentially, this number measures the average absolute swing in a driver\u2019s advancement odds, for good or for bad, across all possible outcomes at a race.) In my 10,000 playoff simulations, Van Gisbergen\u2019s chances changed by an average of +\/- 20 percentage points, with huge upside again if he can even have a decent run at the Enjoy Illinois 300 \u2014 but also a devastating downside with another weak finish:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

It\u2019s no secret that, for all of SVG\u2019s brilliance at road courses, he struggles at basically all of the other track types<\/a>. His average combined Driver Rating<\/a> at ovals, short tracks and superspeedways is just 46.6 \u2014 league average for Cup is 70 \u2014 which is a whopping 73.2 points lower than his incredible 119.8 rating at road courses.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Again, this makes him an unprecedented threat to win on the road; the next-highest career Driver Rating at those tracks<\/a> belonged to Marcos Ambrose at 113.8. But it also makes him an easy mark for better conventional NASCAR drivers when there isn\u2019t a road course in sight, which explains why SVG\u2019s playoff odds are in freefall despite all the points he banked away during the regular season.<\/p>\n

Right now, SVG remains <\/a>just <\/a>above the cutline<\/a>, 3 points clear of Joey Logano for the No. 12 spot in the standings. He might have even been helped some by the twin Darlington nightmares<\/a> of Alex Bowman and Josh Berry, a couple of higher-rated overall drivers who each find themselves 19 points below Van Gisbergen with two races before the cutoff.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a reason why both Logano and Austin Dillon (who is within 8 points of SVG himself) are right next to Van Gisbergen in the pressure rankings: Both are hunting the one spot that SVG, with his poor projected performance at Gateway<\/a> (and to only a slightly lesser extent, short tracks like the first-round finale in Bristol), is likely to relinquish over the next few races. With a bunch of better oval drivers above and below him in the standings, Van Gisbergen is feeling the squeeze.<\/p>\n

SVG still has a chance to advance if he can string together even a couple of half-decent races at Gateway and Bristol. If he finished in the teens in both races, he\u2019d have a nearly 70 percent chance of making it through \u2014 whether by holding off Logano\/Dillon or keeping steady as others fell below the cutline:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

But his odds of finishing 20th or better in both races are just 20 percent, and that subjectively feels like it might be overstating things. Finishes other drivers find ordinary \u2014 even subpar \u2014 at ovals and short tracks would be heroic for Van Gisbergen in the weeks ahead.<\/p>\n

But considering what\u2019s on the line, with his presumptive favorite status at the Roval looming, heroism is what the moment calls for. Otherwise, a prime season for the greatest track-specific superpower in NASCAR history may go to waste without ever being put to use when it matters most.<\/p>\n

Filed under: NASCAR<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Shane Van Gisbergen, driver of the #88 WeatherTech Chevrolet, enters his car during qualifying for the NASCAR Cup…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":116580,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[446],"tags":[49,48,634,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-116579","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nascar","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-nascar","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116579\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/116580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}